Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates (Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology) 9780198846970, 0198846975

Table of contents :
Cover
Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Extended Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Frequently Cited Principles
Introduction: The Communicatio Idiomatum and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation
0.1 The Council of Chalcedon and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation
0.2 Christological Semantics and the Communicatio Idiomatum
0.2.1 Options for Christological Semantics
0.2.2 The Communicatio Idiomatum
0.3 The Distinction between Concrete and Abstract
0.4 On What Follows
1: Luther and Zwingli
1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union
1.1.1 Luther
1.1.1.1 The Metaphysics of the Supposital Union
1.1.1.2 The Hypostatic Union: Semantic Issues
1.1.1.3 The Divine Person and Human Properties
1.1.2 Zwingli
1.2 Christ’s Human Nature and Divine Attributes: Metaphysical Issues
1.2.1 Luther
1.2.1.1 Bodily Omnipresence
1.2.1.2 Further Instances of SG-Possession
1.2.2 Zwingli
1.3 The Semantics of the Communicatio Idiomatum
1.3.1 Zwingli
1.3.2 Luther
1.3.2.1 The Semantics of the Communicatio Idiomatum
1.3.2.2 The Definition of the Communicatio Idiomatum
1.4 Luther’s Originality: A Brief Note
2: Early Lutheran Christologies
2.1 Melanchthon’s Early Christology
2.2 Melanchthon’s Later Christology
2.2.1 Melanchthon’s Christology, 1533–50
2.2.2 Melanchthon’s Christology, 1550–60
2.3 Brenz’s Early Christology: The Origin of the Genus Maiestaticum
2.3.1 The General Metaphysical and Semantic Principles of Brenz’s Christology
2.3.2 Brenz’s Early Christology
2.3.3 Brenz and the Stuttgart Colloquy with Lasco
2.4 Brenz’s Christology in 1561: Refining the Genus Maiestaticum
2.4.1 Bullinger’s Anti-Lutheran Arguments
2.4.2 Brenz on the Semantics of the Genus Idiomaticum
2.4.3 Brenz on the Metaphysics of the Genus Maiestaticum
2.5 Schwenckfeld
3: Calvin and his Lutheran Opponents
3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union
3.1.1 Calvin
3.1.2 Westphal
3.1.3 Hesshus
3.2 Vivification and Bodily Presence
3.2.1 Westphal
3.2.2 Hesshus
3.2.3 Calvin
3.3 Vivification and Causal Presence
3.3.1 Calvin
3.3.2 Westphal
3.3.3 Hesshus
4: Lutheran and Reformed Debates in the Early 1560s
4.1 Vermigli
4.2 Brenz’s Late Christology
4.2.1 Brenz on the Metaphysics of Union
4.2.2 Brenz on the Communicated Attributes
4.3 Reformed Responses: Bullinger and Beza
4.3.1 Bullinger
4.3.2 Beza
4.4 Andreae and the Colloquy of Maulbronn
4.4.1 Andreae’s Early Christology
4.4.2 The Colloquy of Maulbronn
5: The Genus Maiestaticum in Non-Brenzian Christologies
5.1 Schegk
5.2 Wigand
5.2.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Idiomaticum
5.2.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum
5.3 Chemnitz, De Duabus Naturis in Christo (1570)
5.3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union
5.3.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum
6: The Formula of Concord and Lutheran Christology in the 1570s
6.1 Negotiating Luther’s Christological Heritage
6.1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union
6.1.2 Predication in Abstracto
6.1.3 Power and Bodily Omnipresence
6.2 The Formula of Concord (1577/1580)
6.3 Chemnitz, De Duabus Naturis in Christo (1578 Edition)
6.3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union
6.3.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum
6.4 A ‘Second Martin’?
7: Andreae and Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard
7.1 Andreae’s Later Christology
7.1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union and the Genus Idiomaticum
7.1.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum
7.2 Beza’s Response
7.2.1 The Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union
7.2.2 Christological Semantics
Concluding Remarks
Tables
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

C H A N G I N G P A R A D I G M S IN H I S T O R I C A L A N D S YS T E M A T I C T H E O L O G Y General Editors

SARAH COAKLEY RICHARD CROSS This series sets out to reconsider the modern distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘systematic’ theology. The scholarship represented in the series is marked by attention to the way in which historiographic and theological presumptions (‘paradigms’) necessarily inform the work of historians of Christian thought, and thus affect their application to contemporary concerns. At certain key junctures such paradigms are recast, causing a reconsideration of the methods, hermeneutics, geographical boundaries, or chronological caesuras which have previously guided the theological narrative. The beginning of the twenty-first century marks a period of such notable reassessment of the Christian doctrinal heritage, and involves a questioning of the paradigms that have sustained the classic ‘history-of-ideas’ textbook accounts of the modern era. Each of the volumes in this series brings such contemporary methodological and historiographical concerns to conscious consideration. Each tackles a period or key figure whose significance is ripe for reconsideration, and each analyses the implicit historiography that has sustained existing scholarship on the topic. A variety of fresh methodological concerns are considered, without reducing the theological to other categories. The emphasis is on an awareness of the history of ‘reception’: the possibilities for contemporary theology are bound up with a careful rewriting of the historical narrative. In this sense, ‘historical’ and ‘systematic’ theology are necessarily conjoined, yet also closely connected to a discerning interdisciplinary engagement. This monograph series accompanies the project of The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Christian Theology (Oxford University Press, in progress), also edited by Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

CHANGING PARADIGMS IN HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY General Editors Sarah Coakley (Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity Emertia, University of Cambridge) and Richard Cross (John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame)    Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall The Secret Instinct William Wood Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch Johannes Zachhuber Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance Paul L. Gavrilyuk Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses Perceiving Splendour Mark McInroy Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus Boyd Taylor Coolman Prayer after Augustine A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition Jonathan D. Teubner God Visible Patristic Christology Reconsidered Brian E. Daley, SJ Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age Norman Russell

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Communicatio Idiomatum Reformation Christological Debates RICHARD CROSS

1

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Richard Cross 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941384 ISBN 978–0–19–884697–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Eleoma und Georg Bodammer gewidmet

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Preface This book has been in my mind for many years—indeed, since 1991, when I was asked to write a couple of articles on Medieval and Reformation Christology for an encyclopedia which never ultimately materialized. I occasionally did little bits of reading on the topic in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which has a magnificent collection of all the relevant material, doubtless purchased on publication in the mid-sixteenth century. When I moved from Oxford to Notre Dame in 2007, the Bodleian books remained where they were, and—as I imagined—my book would remain unwritten. But two things occurred that made work on the book not only feasible but in a way intellectually pressing. The first was reading Timothy Pawl’s illuminating account of Christological semantics, which suddenly enabled me to understand what was really at stake in the Christological disagreements between Luther and Zwingli (or so I hope). The second was the remarkable project of digitization, undertaken by Google and various libraries (in particular the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and others in Germany and Switzerland), which allows the contents of the volumes left at Oxford to be present on a computer screen or tablet, and thus in the American Midwest too. (And I should also mention the Post-Reformation Digital Library, curated at Calvin College, which makes finding these digitized copies relatively straightforward.) So finally I had the means to write the book, and sufficient understanding of the material to make the project worthwhile. And after almost thirty years’ delay, the whole thing, barring some of the work on Luther, was researched and written in less than a year, between November 2017 and September 2018. After the decade-long agony of working on Duns Scotus’s theory of cognition, the experience of writing this book was a pleasure from start to finish. In it, I approach the Reformation theologians in a way that readers familiar with the texts and the literature about them may find unconventional. I treat the texts as offering arguments for the various positions defended, and I read these arguments as contributions to discussion that should be taken seriously. And the way to take an argument seriously is to consider its dialectical context within an ongoing conversation, and to assess its soundness given the kinds of assumptions that are made in the debates of which it is part. It is standard among students of Medieval theology to undertake this kind of reading. It is unusual for readers of the authors I examine here to do so, in part because, although there are arguments present in the texts, they are not highlighted in the way that they are in the Medieval ones. But this does not mean that the arguments were not intended to be convincing, or that they were intended to be only speciously persuasive. So what

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

viii



I offer here is as rigorous an analysis of the debates as I can manage. As anyone who knows the texts and secondary literature will see, doing this sheds considerable new light on both the content of the positions discussed and the trajectory of the overall debates. I should say at the outset that many of the arguments that made up part of the debates I discuss fall short as arguments—indeed, they simply fail, and should not have been taken (or be taken now) to be persuasive. This does not mean that the conclusions that the arguments are intended to support are false. There may be further arguments, or other considerations—for example, Scriptural or Patristic authority—that would tell in favour of the relevant theological claims. In fact, the resolution of these issues was held by those involved in the disputes to be fundamentally a matter of Scriptural interpretation. A full history of the topic I examine here would need to take account of this. Indeed, such a thing would make a wonderful research project for someone interested in the systematic issues under discussion, or in Wirkungsgeschichte more generally. To this extent, my aims here are merely propaideutic to the serious theological work that would be needed to come to some kind of decision on the substantive question of the truth of the various positions I discuss. But I hope nevertheless to rule out specious reasons in favour of particular views, and to do my authors the justice of taking their arguments seriously. For myself, I have no allegiance to either Lutheran or Reformed orthodoxies, and hope this allows me the distance to think about the debates with some degree of clarity. I prescind, too, from considerations of the historical and political components of the debates. In so doing, I do not deny the importance of these issues. But human activity and its history often seem overdetermined—not because we have too much information about it, but because we have too little. We could give an explanatory account of confessionalization in early Protestantism, or of the divergences and concordances between my thinkers, purely in political or cultural terms, and a similar one purely in theological terms. Saying this by no means entails that the political sphere had no influence on the theological, or vice versa. It simply means that tracing through the topic purely at the level of theological and conceptual analysis is a legitimate way of presenting the material. Other emphases could tell much the same story in very different terms. What follows is not intended to be a complete history of the relevant debates. To write such a thing would be a massive undertaking. Generally, I do not trace the discussions through all their twists and turns, and in all their minute detail. The conversations tended to be highly repetitive, and authors frequently published objections to their opponents that simply reiterated the initial positions that the opponents believed themselves to have refuted. So unless something crucial turns on the sequence of the debate, I simply use what I take to be an author’s definitive statement of their position—very frequently but not always written in Latin. And I sometimes spread the discussion of a single author over more than one chapter.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



ix

To the extent that an author’s views developed, they did so entirely on the basis of debate with one or more opponents. I try to trace the developments, since in this kind of case there is often no synthetic view to present. This means following the discussions in an individual author across sometimes thirty or more years of theological activity: hence the somewhat diffuse nature of the treatments of certain individual theologians here. The issues are complex and the discussion perforce quite dense. I eschew generality, and focus on the particularities of a theologian’s position, paying very close attention to divergences in expression in relation to views that may seem very close to each other. In the Introduction I set out the relevant Patristic and Medieval background, and sketch the metaphysical and semantic issues that I take to be integral to the Reformation debates. The material in this chapter is rather abstract, and I have tried to write the book so that individual chapters can be read independently—and thus so that it would be possible to read later chapters without working carefully through the Introduction. For convenience I have listed on pp. xxiii–xxiv a set of principles that I refer to frequently throughout the book, some of which I describe and defend in the Introduction (and some of which I describe and defend later on). I am sorry that there are so many of them; they reflect the vast range of different views among the Lutheran theologians, and the highly nuanced divergences between them. The devil—or in this case, Jesus—is in the details. I express the principles in a way that requires a little work on the part of the reader. They are intended to make matters ultimately more intelligible; but the principles simply articulate claims that can be found in the prose, and the reader who finds them unhelpful can ignore them. As we shall see, the influence of the Christologies of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham is pervasive in those Reformation theologians who paid any attention to Scholastic thought on matters Christological (which is to say, almost all of them). Noting the sometimes pervasive Christological influence of Medieval Scholasticism, of course, by no means commits me to a view on whether or not the thought of a given Reformer was fundamentally Scholastic or not. My account extends no further than Christology, and is restricted in all of the ways to which I have just drawn attention. After some prevaricating, I decided to use ‘man’, not ‘human being’, to refer to the incarnate divine person. The reason is just syntactic flexibility: grammatically, we tolerate locutions of the form ‘God is man’ (as well, of course, as ‘God is a man’, ‘God is this man’, for example). But we do not tolerate locutions of the form ‘God is human being’. Indeed, this last locution sounds like nonsense; to the extent that it has a semantic value, this value is different from that of ‘God is man’. ‘God is human’ is possible, as is ‘God is a human being’, but, again, even on the assumption that ‘man’ is understood as gender-neutral, these do not capture the precise

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

x



semantic range of ‘God is man’. And it would be hard to write the book without the availability of this range—not only because of the Latin ‘Deus est homo’, but because of the German ‘Gott ist Mensch’. To those (including myself ) to whom this is marginally offensive, or worse, I apologize (as I do for the oddity of this apology). I do not see what else to do.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Acknowledgements I need to thank various people for their help. Alister McGrath first sparked my interest in the whole subject, and in the history of Christology more generally. Conversations and/or correspondence with Kenneth G. Appold, John Betz, Eleoma Bodammer, Pavel Butakov, Brian T. Carl, Ingolf Dalferth, Stephen T. Davis, Volker Drecoll, Ralph Keen, Hans-Peter Grosshans, David Gura, Ian McFarland, JT Paasch, Christopher Shields, Jeff Speaks, Robert Vilain, Rowan Williams, and Johannes Zachhuber provided me with invaluable help. Timothy Pawl read a draft of the introductory chapter and provided me with extensive comments, forcing me to deal with some powerful objections, and saving me from numerous errors, some subtle, some horrifyingly obvious. The resulting version is much better than the one he had to suffer, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. Deni Gamboa discussed Ockham’s semantics with me during a long bus journey through the mountains from Puebla to Mexico City, and this helped me greatly in thinking through some of the issues in Chapter 1—for which I thank her. Versions of this chapter were delivered at various conferences and colloquia, and I thank the organizers and participants for listening to and commenting on the paper: the ‘After Obermann’ conference organized by Christine Helmer at Northwestern, with thanks in particular to Christine, Volker Leppin, David Luy, Graham White, and the late Marilyn McCord Adams; a conference on the reception and retrieval of Christian theology held at the University of St Thomas (MN), organized by Paul Gavrilyuk, with thanks to Sarah Coakley, Mark McInroy and Philip Rolnick; and a systematic theology seminar at Fuller, with thanks to Oliver Crisp for the invitation, and to Oliver, Carl Mosser, and JT Turner for comments and discussion. Two anonymous referees for Oxford University Press provided rare help and encouragement. Kim Richardson was a helpfully non-interventionist copy editor, leaving my prose as I want it to be. Alan Krieger, the philosophy and theology subject librarian at Notre Dame, was unstinting both with his time and with the library’s resources (and it is fair to say that this Catholic library now has a better collection of Protestant sources than it did before I started this project); and Karl Stutzman, the librarian at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, just down the road from Notre Dame, generously provided me with materials that I could not find at Notre Dame. To both I express thanks. And finally, particular thanks to my co-editor, Sarah, for taking on single-handedly the work as series editor for this book, and to Tom Perridge, the Press’s religion editor. Defects, of course, are my own responsibility.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Contents Abbreviations Frequently Cited Principles

Introduction: The Communicatio Idiomatum and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation

xix xxiii

1

1. Luther and Zwingli

39

2. Early Lutheran Christologies

86

3. Calvin and his Lutheran Opponents

120

4. Lutheran and Reformed Debates in the Early 1560s

141

5. The Genus Maiestaticum in Non-Brenzian Christologies

166

6. The Formula of Concord and Lutheran Christology in the 1570s

189

7. Andreae and Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard

226

Concluding Remarks Tables Bibliography Index

256 263 267 277

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Extended Table of Contents Abbreviations Frequently Cited Principles

Introduction: The Communicatio Idiomatum and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation 0.1 The Council of Chalcedon and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation 0.2 Christological Semantics and the Communicatio Idiomatum 0.2.1 Options for Christological Semantics 0.2.2 The Communicatio Idiomatum

0.3 The Distinction between Concrete and Abstract 0.4 On What Follows

1. Luther and Zwingli 1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 1.1.1 Luther 1.1.1.1 The Metaphysics of the Supposital Union 1.1.1.2 The Hypostatic Union: Semantic Issues 1.1.1.3 The Divine Person and Human Properties

1.1.2 Zwingli 1.2 Christ’s Human Nature and Divine Attributes: Metaphysical Issues 1.2.1 Luther 1.2.1.1 Bodily Omnipresence 1.2.1.2 Further Instances of SG-Possession

1.2.2 Zwingli 1.3 The Semantics of the Communicatio Idiomatum 1.3.1 Zwingli 1.3.2 Luther 1.3.2.1 The Semantics of the Communicatio Idiomatum 1.3.2.2 The Definition of the Communicatio Idiomatum

xix xxiii

1 1 11 11 21 27 31

39 40 40 40 42 56

58

59 59 59 65

70 72 73 77 77 82

1.4 Luther’s Originality: A Brief Note

84

2. Early Lutheran Christologies 2.1 Melanchthon’s Early Christology 2.2 Melanchthon’s Later Christology

86 86 87

2.2.1 Melanchthon’s Christology, 1533–50 2.2.2 Melanchthon’s Christology, 1550–60

87 90

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

xvi

    2.3 Brenz’s Early Christology: The Origin of the Genus Maiestaticum 2.3.1 The General Metaphysical and Semantic Principles of Brenz’s Christology 2.3.2 Brenz’s Early Christology 2.3.3 Brenz and the Stuttgart Colloquy with Lasco 2.4 Brenz’s Christology in 1561: Refining the Genus Maiestaticum 2.4.1 Bullinger’s Anti-Lutheran Arguments 2.4.2 Brenz on the Semantics of the Genus Idiomaticum 2.4.3 Brenz on the Metaphysics of the Genus Maiestaticum 2.5 Schwenckfeld

3. Calvin and his Lutheran Opponents 3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 3.1.1 Calvin 3.1.2 Westphal 3.1.3 Hesshus

3.2 Vivification and Bodily Presence 3.2.1 Westphal 3.2.2 Hesshus 3.2.3 Calvin 3.3 Vivification and Causal Presence 3.3.1 Calvin 3.3.2 Westphal 3.3.3 Hesshus

4. Lutheran and Reformed Debates in the Early 1560s 4.1 Vermigli 4.2 Brenz’s Late Christology 4.2.1 Brenz on the Metaphysics of Union 4.2.2 Brenz on the Communicated Attributes

4.3 Reformed Responses: Bullinger and Beza 4.3.1 Bullinger 4.3.2 Beza 4.4 Andreae and the Colloquy of Maulbronn 4.4.1 Andreae’s Early Christology 4.4.2 The Colloquy of Maulbronn

5. The Genus Maiestaticum in Non-Brenzian Christologies 5.1 Schegk 5.2 Wigand

95 95 101 105

107 108 109 111 116

120 122 122 124 126

126 127 128 131 135 135 139 140

141 142 145 145 149

152 152 153 157 158 163

166 166 170

5.2.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Idiomaticum 5.2.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum

170 174

5.3 Chemnitz, De Duabus Naturis in Christo (1570) 5.3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 5.3.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum

178 178 181

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

6. The Formula of Concord and Lutheran Christology in the 1570s 6.1 Negotiating Luther’s Christological Heritage 6.1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 6.1.2 Predication in Abstracto 6.1.3 Power and Bodily Omnipresence

6.2 The Formula of Concord (1577/1580) 6.3 Chemnitz, De Duabus Naturis in Christo (1578 Edition) 6.3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 6.3.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum 6.4 A ‘Second Martin’?

7. Andreae and Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard 7.1 Andreae’s Later Christology 7.1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union and the Genus Idiomaticum 7.1.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum

xvii

189 190 190 195 198

200 209 210 215 224

226 227 227 237

7.2 Beza’s Response 7.2.1 The Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union 7.2.2 Christological Semantics

244 244 248

Concluding Remarks

256

Tables Bibliography Index

263 267 277

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Abbreviations Primary Sources Andreae, Jakob Acta Assertio De duabus De maiest. Epitome

Acta Colloquii Monte Beligardensis Assertio piae et orthodoxae doctrinae de personali unione Disputatio de duabus naturis in Christo Disputatio de maiestate hominis Christi Epitome colloquii Montisbelgartensis

Aquinas, Thomas De ente ST

De ente et essentia Summa theologiae

Aristotle Cat. De an.

Categoriae De anima

Athanasius Or. cont. Ar.

Orationes contra Arianos

Augustine De trin. Ep.

De trinitate Epistula

Basil of Caesarea Ep.

Epistula

Beza, Theodore Plac. resp. Resp. Biel, Gabriel Coll. Brenz, Johannes Acta Stutt. De maiest. De pers. unione In ioann. Recognitio Sent.

Ad Domini Joannis Brentii argumenta . . . placidum et modestum responsio Ad acta colloquii Montisbelgardensis Tubingae edita . . . responsio Collectorium circa quatuor libros sententiarum Acta Stuttgardiensia De maiestate Domini nostri Iesu Christi De personali unione In divi Ioannis evangelion . . . exegesis Recognitio propheticae et apostolicae doctrinae de vera maiestate Domini nostri Jesu Christi Sententia de libello D. Henrici Bullingeri

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

xx



Bullinger, Heinrich Apol. exp. Repetitio Calvin, John Dil. exp. Inst. Secunda def. Ult. ad.

Apologetica expositio Repetitio et dilucidior explicatio consensus veteris orthodoxae catholicaeque Christi Ecclesiae Dilucida expositio sanae doctrinae de vera participatione carnis et sanguinis Christi in sacra coena Institutio Christianae religionis Secunda defensio piae et orthodoxae de sacramentis fidei contra Joachimi Westphali calumnias Ultima admonitio . . . ad Ioachimum Westphalum

Chemnitz, Martin De duabus (1570) De duabus (1578)

De duabus naturis in Christo (first edition) De duabus naturis in Christo (second edition)

Curaeus, Joachim Ex. pers.

Exegesis perspicua

Cyril of Alexandria In Joann.

In D. Joannis Evangelium

Duns Scotus, John Ord. Rep. Epitome Grundtlicher Bericht

Ordinatio Reportatio Konkordienformel, Epitome Warhafftiger unnd grundtlicher Bericht von dem Gesprech . . . zü Maulbronn gehalten

Hesshus, Tilman De duabus De praes.

De duabus in Christo naturis De praesentia corporis Christi in coena Domini

John of Damascus Exp. fid.

Expositio fidei

König, Johann Theol.

Theologia positiva acroamatica

Lasco, John a Decl. de coena

Declaratio de coena

Lombard, Peter Sent.

Sententiae

Luther, Martin Dass diese Worte Disp. de div. Disp. de sent. En. 53. cap. Es. Vom Abendmahl Von den Konz.

Dass diese Worte Christi ‘Das ist mein Leib’ noch feste stellen Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi Disputatio de sententia: Verbum caro factum est (Joh. 1, 14) Enarratio 53. capitis Esaiae Vom Abendmahl Christi: Bekenntnis Von den Konziliis und Kirchen

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

 Melanchthon, Philip En. ep. ad Col. En. sym. nic. Erot. dial. Expl. sym. nic. Loci (1535) Loci (1559)

Enarratio epistolae Pauli ad Colossenses Enarratio symboli niceni Erotemata dialectices Explicatio symboli niceni Loci communes (1535) Loci communes (1559)

Mentzer, Balthasar Def.

Necessaria et iusta defensio contra iniustas criminationes

Nicholai, Melchior Cons. theol.

Consideratio theologica quatuor quaestionum controversarum

Osiander, Andreas De unico

De unico mediatore . . . confessio

Osiander, Lucas Bericht

Bericht vom Nachtmahl

Piscator, Henry Rep.

Sanae et orthodoxae . . . doctrinae . . . repetitio

Porphyry Isag.

Isagoge

Schegk, Jacob De una pers. Solida decisio Solida declaratio

De una persona et duabus naturis Christi Solida verboque dei . . . congrua decisio Konkordienformel, Solida declaratio

xxi

Vermigli, Peter Martyr Dial. Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura Westphal, Joachim Adv. sac. Apol.

Adversus cuiusdam sacramentarii falsam criminationem Apologia confessionis de coena Domini

Wigand De comm.

De communicatio idiomatum

William of Ockham Rep. Sum. log.

Reportatio Summa logicae

Zwingli, Huldrych Amica exegesis Fid. exp.

Amica exegesis, id est: expositio eucharistiae negocii ad Martinum Lutherum Fidei expositio

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

xxii



Series CCSL CR CS CSEL LCC LW NPNF OPh OTh PG PL St. A. WA WA Br. WR TR

Corpus Christianorum series Latina Corpus reformatorum Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Library of Christian Classics Martin Luther, Works Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers William of Ockham, Opera philosophica William of Ockham, Opera theologica J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina Studienausgabe Martin Luther, Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe Martin Luther, Briefwechsel: kritische Gesamtausgabe Martin Luther, Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Frequently Cited Principles Semantic Principles AGM₁-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the divine person p exercises Φd-ness through the human nature h’; and p exercises Φd-ness through h iff h is the same* person as p. AGM₂-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the divine person p exercises Φd-ness through the human nature h’; and p exercises Φd-ness through h only if (h bears Φd-ness, and h is the same* person as p). BeN-semantics: ‘God is φp’ =def ‘God sustains a human nature that is Φp’. BeS-semantics: ‘God is man’ =def ‘God sustains a human nature’. BGM-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the human nature h bears Φd-ness’; and h bears Φd-ness iff h is the same* person as the divine person. BGM*-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the human nature h bears Φd-ness, and h exercises Φd-ness’; and (h bears Φd-ness, and h exercises Φd-ness) iff h is the same* person as the divine person. BH-semantics: ‘the Son of God is φp’ =def ‘the divine person p bears Φp-ness’; and p bears Φp-ness iff (the human nature h bears Φp-ness, and h is the same* person as p). BS-semantics: ‘God is man’ =def ‘the divine person and the human nature are the same* person’. CGM₁-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h (or Christ according to h) is φd’ =def ‘the divine person p exercises Φd-ness in the human nature h’; and p exercises Φd-ness in h only if p bears h. CGM₂-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h (or Christ according to h) is φd’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness only if (h bears Φd-ness, and p bears h). CN-semantics: ‘Christ is φ’ =def ‘Christ has a nature n, and n has Φ-ness’; and Christ is φp only if it is not the case that Christ bears Φp-ness. DS-semantics: ‘Christ is φd (according to his human nature h)’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness only if h bears Φd-ness; and h bears Φd-ness iff h is personally united to the divine person. DS’-semantics: ‘Christ is φd (according to his human nature h)’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness iff h bears Φd-ness; and h bears Φd-ness iff h is personally united to the divine person. H-semantics: ‘a hypostasis x is φ’ =def ‘x has φ-ness’. HF-semantics: ‘a hypostasis x is φ’ =def ‘x has Φ-ness’. HGM-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h is φd’ =def ‘h has Φd-ness’. LH-semantics: ‘a hypostasis x is φ’ =def ‘x has Φ-ness’; and Christ has Φp-ness iff Christ bears Φp-ness; and Christ bears Φp-ness iff (Christ bears a human nature h, and h bears Φp-ness). LS-semantics: ‘God is man’ =def ‘God and this man are the same thing’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

xxiv

  

N-semantics: ‘Christ is φ’ =def ‘Christ has a nature n, and n has φ-ness’. NF-semantics: ‘Christ is φ’ =def ‘Christ has a nature n, and n has Φ-ness’. P-semantics: ‘x is φ’ =def ‘x has a nature that is φ’. WGM-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h (or Christ according to h) is φd’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness only if h bears Φd-ness; and h bears Φd-ness iff Christ bears h. Metaphysical Principles BMP: Any divine property had by the whole Christ is had by Christ’s two natures (supposing that the property is possibly had by Christ’s two natures). GMP: Any property had by a whole is had by the parts of that whole. IBS: If Christ’s two natures lack two-way spatial inseparability, the person is not indivisible. Other Sigla and Definitions CN: ‘When we say he suffered and rose again, [it is] not that God the Word suffered blows, nail-piercings or other wounds in his own nature (the divine is impassible because it is incorporeal), but that since his own created body suffered these things he himself suffered for our sake, the point being that within the suffering body was the impassible.’ (Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius, c. 5: see p. 13 below) ‘Genus maiestaticumB’: the genus maiestaticum construed on the assumption that the Son of Man is identical with the human nature. ‘Realf’: a predication ‘x is φ’ is realf iff x is Φ; the communicatio is realf iff the predication expressing it is realf. ‘Realt’: a predication is realt iff it is true. ‘Same*’ signifies a relation of identity relativized to a sortal. ‘SG-possession’/‘SG-predication’: Christ’s human nature’s possession of/being subject of predication by supernatural gifts (be they created or uncreated); or Christ’s doing so/ being so in virtue of his human nature. ‘UC-ordering’: the logical ordering of the metaphysical stages in the union and communicatio. ‘Φ-ness’ signifies the property had or borne by x such that x’s having or bearing Φ-ness explains the truth of ‘x is φ’. ‘φd-ness’ signifies a divine attribute. ‘φp-ness’ signifies an accident or proprium in Porphyry’s scheme of predicables.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Introduction The Communicatio Idiomatum and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation

0.1 The Council of Chalcedon and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation According to the Council of Chalcedon (451), a divine person, the second person of the Trinity, while remaining divine, became a human being. Among other things, this means that the person began to be two kinds of thing—divine and human—simultaneously. In the technical language of Christian theology, we can say that the person began to have two natures, a human one in addition to the divine one: We teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin;¹ begotten of his Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer, as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion (ἀσυγχύτως), no change (ἀτρέπτως), no division (ἀδιαιρέτως), no separation (ἀχωρίστως); at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property (ἰδιότητος/ proprietate) of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single hypostasis; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ.²

A natural way of construing this would be to take persons to be, minimally, among the kinds of thing that cannot be properties of anything. Aristotle had something like this in mind when he attempted to characterize what it is to be a substance: ‘Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that

¹ For this clause, see Heb. 4:15. ² In Norman Tanner (ed.), The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), I, *86, slightly altered.

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

2

 

which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual human being or horse.’³ The technical theological term for such a thing is ‘hypostasis’ (as in the decree just quoted), or, in later Medieval Latin jargon, ‘suppositum’. In what follows I treat all three terms (‘hypostasis’, ‘suppositum’, and ‘person’) as synonyms, ways of talking in this context about the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.⁴ According to the creed of Chalcedon, Jesus Christ—a person or hypostasis—is identified as the ‘Son of God’ or ‘Word’: he is ‘one and the same’ as ‘the only-begotten Son’. This hypostasis has divine nature (it is ‘consubstantial with the Father’), and gains human nature in time (it is ‘consubstantial with us . . . in the last days’). Since what is involved is a union of two natures in one hypostasis, this union of natures is usually labelled the ‘hypostatic union’. There are various lists here specifying ways of referring to the incarnate person: ‘Son’, ‘Lord’, ‘Jesus Christ’, ‘God’, ‘Word’. As the decree makes clear, these names refer to something that is ‘one and the same’. On the most obvious interpretation, what this means is that the referents of each term are identical: whatever is true of the person picked out by one name is true of the person picked out by any other of the names. (Identity is a reflexive relation (a relation that an item has to itself ) that satisfies the following conditional: if x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y (the so-called Indiscernibility of Identicals).) Whatever is true of Christ or Jesus is true of the Son or the Word, for example—the second person of the Trinity. Given that ‘the same is truly God and truly man’, it follows as well that whatever is true of the Son or the Word (or any other of the names listed in Chalcedon) is true of the man too. That is of course not to say that whatever is true of the Son or the Word is true of the human nature or humanity. Indeed, the Council seems to exclude this possibility, by specifying that the union is ‘in’ two natures that ‘undergo no confusion [or] change’, and that retain their ‘difference’, such that ‘the property of both natures is preserved’. The humanity is that in virtue of which it is true that God is man, or that (this) man is God; and likewise for all other divine and human predicates. As we shall see, disagreement on this point underlies quite a bit of the Reformation debate that I discuss in later chapters of this book, and I mention it at appropriate junctures below.⁵ ³ Aristotle, Cat., c. 5 (2a11–12). Note the apparent conjunction of two distinct relations here, linguistic and ontological (predicable of; present in): a distinction that will turn out to be very significant in what follows, as we shall see. ⁴ There are differences in the senses of these terms, since ‘person’ is supposed to be restricted merely to those hypostases or supposita that are intellectual or rational. But this difference is irrelevant to my purposes, and I ignore it in what follows. ⁵ One could take ‘Christ’, or even ‘man’, to refer to the mereological sum of the divine person and human nature. I have argued elsewhere that some Medieval thinkers did so (see my The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 128–33). But note that taking the terms in this way does not affect the truth-values of substantive Christological predications: whatever such predicates are true of the divine person (e.g. ‘is man’; ‘is God’; ‘suffers’) are true of the mereological sum too.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



3

The Chalcedonian decree just quoted was understood to exclude two opposing views: one-nature theories and Nestorian theories. One-nature views include the monophysitism sometimes associated with Eutyches (c. 378–c. 454), the Council’s principal target, according to which there is just one complete nature in Christ, the divine (such that Christ fails to be consubstantial with us); and the miaphysite view according to which there is one nature in Christ, a uniquely divine–human nature comprising all the properties necessary for being divine, and all the properties necessary for being human. The view often associated with Nestorius (d. after 451) and the theologians of fifth-century Antioch is that there is a unified person, Christ, comprising two distinct concrete particulars—the Son of God and a man—such that human properties are predicated of the man but cannot truly be predicated of the Son of God, and divine properties are predicated of the Son of God but cannot truly be predicated of the man. On this view, both divine and human properties are predicated of Christ, but Christ fails to be identical with the Son of God. Monophysite and Nestorian views are quite different from the Chalcedonian one. On both of these, as I have outlined them, there is a sense in which it is false that the divine person is a genuine human being: on monophysite views because the Son of God fails to exemplify a complete human nature, and on Nestorian views because the Son of God (as opposed to Christ, the whole comprising the Son of God and the human being Jesus) fails to exemplify a human nature at all, be it complete or incomplete. There is a crucial though less dramatic difference between miaphysite and Chalcedonian views: the Chalcedonian view is consistent with an account according to which natures are borne by persons, and nonnecessary properties associated with natures are borne merely by the natures; the miaphysite one is not so consistent (since there are not distinct natures to be the subjects of the different types of properties). So Chalcedon prescribes a union of two natures in one person, and theologians have by and large identified two ways of construing this union. One, with a venerable history stretching well back before Chalcedon itself, makes the union between the two natures basic, and thus explains their somehow composing one person on the basis of their union to each other. A natural model for such a theory is the union of soul and body constituting a human person. Here is what Cyril of Alexandria (378–444) says: May we illustrate the case from the composition which renders us human beings? We are composed out of soul and body and observe two different natures (φύσεις), the body’s and the soul’s; yet the pair yields a single united human being, and composition out of two natures does not turn the one man into two men but, as I said, produces a single man, a composite of body and soul.⁶

⁶ Cyril of Alexandria, First Letter to Succensus, c. 7 (ET Cyril of Alexandria, Select Letters, ed. and trans. Lionel R. Wickham, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 77).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

4

 

Talking of the ‘the body’s . . . nature’ and the ‘the soul’s . . . nature’ is circumlocutory, meaning to stress the fact that, just like divine and human natures in Christ, each of the two is a nature,⁷ and just like the hypostatic union, the relevant relation is one between natures. In some accounts of this model, the union between soul and body (and thus between the two natures in Christ) is spelled out in terms of their presence to each other. In relation to an account that sees the divine person simply replacing the human soul in Christ, Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) says this: ‘keep the human being whole and mix (μῖξον) in the Godhead. . . . It is the nature of things immaterial to be mixed (μίγνυσθαι) with each other and with bodies in an indivisible and incorporeal way.’⁸ The mixture language here is a way of talking about the presence of the two natures to each other. Ultimately it derives from Stoic theories of the complete mutual interpenetration (krasis) of mixed stuffs: the notion found its way into Christian theology by means of Neoplatonic interpenetration accounts of the union of soul and body. It involves some kind of directionality: one substance making itself present in the other (the divine in the human). From the time of John of Damascus (d. c. 750) this interpenetration was known under the technical theological term ‘perichoresis’.⁹ On these accounts, then, the union of natures is basic. As models for a Chalcedonian metaphysics of the Incarnation, however, they suffer from various shortcomings. What allows soul and body to constitute a person is among other things that each is in some sense incomplete: they are parts of a whole, something that is not obviously true of the divine person. Neither do the models have anything corresponding to the continuity of person pre- and post-incarnation, or any obvious way of modelling the Chalcedonian claim that whatever is predicated of the divine person is predicated of the man too. If one were to think that the soul alone is a human person, the analogy would be closer to Chalcedon, but this belief would come at the expense of the usefulness of the analogy in suggesting a union of natures in one person.¹⁰ ⁷ See Cyril, To Eulogius (Wickham, 63–5). ⁸ Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101 [Ad cledonium] (Lettres théologiques, ed. Paul Gallay and others, Sources chrétiennes, 208 (Paris: Cerf, 1974), 82; ET On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, ed. and trans. Lionel Wickham, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 159, altered). ⁹ I give a relevant quotation from John below. For accounts of the soul–body relation in terms of interpenetration, see Nemesius of Emesa, De natura hominis, c. 3 (ed. Moreno Morani, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987), 39.16–20, 40.1–7, 40.10–12, 40.19; trans. William Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa, LCC (London: SCM Press, 1955), 295, 296–7). On the link between krasis and perichoresis, see my ‘Perichoresis, Deification, and Christological Predication in John of Damascus’, Mediaeval Studies, 62 (2000), 69–124 (pp. 88–94). For the directionality (from the divine person to the human nature), see the nice discussion in Andrew Hofer, Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus, Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 3. ¹⁰ Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), writing in the early 1680s, maintained that ‘the same thing is said to be the person of a human being and of a separated soul’ (Leibniz, De persona Christi (Sämtliche

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



5

Presence models in general suffer from a further defect too. The problem is that, given divine omnipresence, the divine nature is already fully present to the human. The divine nature cannot simply intensify itself, so to speak, so as to be present in some stronger way, and nothing on the divine side of the presencerelation is thus sufficient to ground this relation. To explain a particular kind of presence in (in this case, hypostatic unity with) the human nature, what is needed is some grounding on the side of the creature, the human nature: tertium non datur. The union of natures (construed as a particular kind of perichoresis or indwelling) needs on the face of it to be grounded on some prior relation. And, indeed, a different approach—arguably intimated at Chalcedon—does exactly that: it makes the hypostatic union derivative of or parasitic on some more basic relation. As Chalcedon presents the matter one and the same person has two natures, and it is natural to suppose that it is this relation—the relation of the natures to the person—that grounds the unity of the natures with each other. An obvious way of modelling this is to think of the union along the lines of the relation between a substance and a property or attribute: one and the same person having a nature, and gaining an additional nature (construed as a set of properties necessary and jointly sufficient for belonging to a given kind), just as a substance can have two (or more) properties, and gain and lose them. For example, the unity relation between an elephant’s nature (its elephant-nature) and an elephant’s size obtains in virtue of the elephant’s having both the elephant-nature and the size— the elephant-nature essentially and the size contingently or accidentally. Properties can be universal or particular, and this leads immediately to two ways of thinking about the union along these lines, conceiving human nature respectively as universal and as particular.¹¹ One might be inclined to think that the first case is relevant to Chalcedon, since on the face of it Chalcedon simply adapts the understanding of the Trinity first proposed by Basil of Caesarea (330–79)—according to which the divine nature or essence is a universal shared by three particular persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit¹²—and applies the distinction between nature and person (as universal and particular) to the case of the Incarnation. On this view the person would begin to instantiate or exemplify human nature, as we might put the matter.

Schriften und Briefe, VI/4, pt. C (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 2296.6)), thereby solving part of the Christological worry—though arguably at the expense of an intelligible account of what it is to be a human person. ¹¹ Another way of conceptualizing this distinction in the literature speaks of abstract-nature vs. concrete-nature incarnation: see Alvin Plantinga, ‘Heresy, Truth, and Mind’, Faith and Philosophy, 16 (1999), 182–93 (pp. 183–4). For reasons that will become plain, Plantinga’s terminology is orthogonal to that used by the Reformation theologians, and I do not adopt it here. ¹² See Basil, Ep. 214, c. 4 (ed. Yves Courtonne, 3 vols, Collection des universités de France (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1957–66), II, 205–6); Ep. 236, c. 6 (III, 53–4).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

6

 

But Chalcedon was (almost) universally interpreted in terms of the second way of conceptualizing the person–nature or substance–property distinction, and indeed includes texts that seem to assume this (as I will show below). Anyone accepting the substance–property model but denying the reality of universal natures—anyone in other words accepting nominalism—would perforce adopt this second kind of view of the matter. But since all of my thinkers accept that Christ’s human nature was a particular, the distinction between those who for other reasons accept the reality of universal natures (realists) and those who do not (nominalists) is Christologically neutral, though it can make a small difference to the semantics of certain Christological locutions, as we shall see in Chapter 1. Perhaps the first thinker to explore this model in detail was Cyril of Alexandria, whose starting point is the thought that the human nature is not essential to the divine person: it is not part of the divine nature, or one of the properties of the person necessary for distinguishing that person from the other divine persons. On this approach, it is natural to think of the human nature as something like an accident or contingent property of the divine person. Cyril talks of the Word ‘making his own (ἰδιοποιεῖσθαι)’ the particular human soul and body.¹³ Ruth M. Siddals comments, Cyril’s meaning here is not easy to determine, but he is patently exploiting the range of technical senses which both Aristotle and Porphyry discuss in connection with the term ἴδιον [i.e. property]. Cyril’s aim . . . is to introduce a fresh perspective into his interpretation of John 1:14 [‘The Word became flesh’]: while on the one hand, he treats humanity as mysteriously inhering within the Word as an accident inheres within a subject, on the other hand he wishes to stress the closeness of this inherence by utilizing the complex notion of property.¹⁴

So this yields an account that explains the hypostatic union by appealing to a relation between a particular contingent feature—a particular human nature—and a particular subject or person. (I return to the Porphyrian background in a moment.) Cyril’s insight that the particular human nature is something akin to an accidental property of the Word was articulated with greater philosophical care in the Middle Ages. It reached its fullest and most theorized formulation in John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308). Scotus claims that we might think of the human nature as a particular that depends, in some special sense, on the second person of the Trinity. This dependence is a kind of relationship of ‘order’. The order cannot be causal, since all causal dependence ‘is common to the whole Trinity’,¹⁵ and ¹³ For a list of references, see Ruth M. Siddals, ‘Logic and Christology in Cyril of Alexandria’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 38 (1987), 341–67 (p. 356, n. 102). ¹⁴ Siddals, ‘Logic and Christology’, 356. ¹⁵ Scotus, Ord. III, d. 1, p. 1, q. 1, n. 14 (ed. C. Balić and others, 21 vols (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 1950–2013), IX, 6).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



7

would thus not secure a relation between a human nature and just one divine person. In his Ordinatio, Scotus makes a suggestion (for convenience, I number the sentences, and refer to them by this means in the discussion that follows): [1] Although it is difficult to see that some dependence could be such, nevertheless all of this can be made clear in some way in a subject and an accident. [2] For an accident has a two-fold relation to its subject or to its substance: namely, [i] of what informs to what is informed (and this necessarily includes imperfection in the informed subject, in that [the subject] has some potentiality with respect to qualified (because accidental) act). [3] It [ii] has another [relation] as of what is naturally posterior to what is prior (on which it depends as on a subject, rather than as a cause, because if it has the subject as some kind of cause, it has it as a material cause, and this to the extent that it informs it). [4] If therefore these two relations between an accident and a subject are distinguished from each other, the one is necessarily directed to a subject under the notion of imperfection in the subject, namely, potentiality, whereas the other does not necessarily posit any imperfection in [the subject], but merely natural priority and sustaining (substantificationem) with relation to the accident. [5] And the relation which is the dependence of the human nature on the divine person is most similar to this [relation of accidental dependence].¹⁶

This text is, I think, of all Medieval discussions the single most influential on subsequent Christology, at least up to the end of the seventeenth century, and we shall see ample evidence of its effect in the discussions that follow in this book.¹⁷ (1) Scotus begins by drawing attention to the salience of the relation between a substance and an accident. (2) He distinguishes two aspects in this relation: the accident informs the substance, and (3) the accident non-causally depends on the substance. As (2) and (4) make clear, ‘informing’ in this context is defined in terms of the actualization of potentiality. In an Aristotelian universe, when a substance x begins to be φ, or (putting it more technically) when φ-ness begins to ‘inform’ x, x’s potentiality for being φ is actualized. In the case of the relation between substance and accident, there is a sense in which substance is primary: hence in (2) the actuality of the accident is described as ‘qualified’. Now God was believed by the Medieval thinkers to be pure actuality, lacking all passive potentiality of the kind just outlined. So no accident could inform God in this way. But informing is not the only feature of the metaphysical relation between substance and accident. As we see in (3) and (4), there is also a sense in which, in the normal run of things, an accident requires a substance for its existence: it depends on it. The sense is ¹⁶ Scotus, Ord. III, d. 1, p. 1, q. 1, nn. 15–16 (Vatican ed., IX, 6–7). For extensive discussion, see my Metaphysics of the Incarnation, ch. 5; for earlier Medieval developments along the same lines, see chs. 3–4. ¹⁷ Aquinas developed a very distinctive mereological Christology—on which, see my Metaphysics of the Incarnation, ch. 2. But it was not really taken up outside the narrow confines of the Dominican order, and had scant influence other than in that context.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

8

 

non-causal. In the Aristotelian universe, substances are not for the most part the efficient causes of their accidents (it is gin, or perhaps a sunlamp, that makes someone turn pink; they do not do it to themselves other than rather indirectly). As Scotus notes in (3), the only plausible Aristotelian cause available in the case of the relation between a substance and an accident is a ‘material cause’: the substance is such a cause of its accident in the sense of being the subject whose potentiality for being such-and-such is actualized by the accident. So this sense of ‘cause’ is pertinent to the informing relationship, not the dependence one. So (5) the human nature non-causally depends on the divine person in something like the way in which an accident non-causally depends on its substance. The active relation corresponding to dependence is sustaining (as in (4)): the human nature depends on the second person of the Trinity, and the divine person sustains the human nature.¹⁸ And this ontological dependence-relation, in turn, grounds our predicating human nature and properties of the divine person.¹⁹ This model—according to which the human nature is something like a (complex) contingent property of the divine person—is that often labelled by Lutheran scholars ‘supposital union’, and, since my major subject here is Reformation Christology I shall for convenience and familiarity adopt this label too, to refer specifically to this kind of relation between the human nature and the divine person as such, in contrast to the hypostatic union of natures.²⁰ It is important to note that the supposital-union theory does not need to be spelled out using Scotus’s language of sustaining and dependence, although it is common for theologians after Scotus to do so. The crucial feature of the model is the close analogy it draws between the relation of the human nature to the divine person, on the one hand, and the relation of an intrinsic accidental property to its substance, on the other—just as in Cyril’s first inchoate description of the model. And there is in principle plenty of theoretical and terminological variety in possible ways of spelling out this relation. So a theologian’s rejection of the Scotist language is not eo ipso evidence that the theologian intends to reject the supposital-union theory as I have just described it. In his Quodlibet, Scotus holds that dependence is a transitive relation: While the dependence of an accident [of Christ] is somehow upon the singular substance [viz. Christ’s human nature] it only ends with the singular as incommunicable [viz. the divine person]. For if it depends on the singular substance

¹⁸ In (4), Scotus uses ‘substantificatio’—literally, substantification. But elsewhere he talks of the second person of the Trinity ‘sustentificans’—sustaining—his human nature (see e.g. Scotus, Ord., prol., p. 3, n. 176 (Vatican ed., I, 119)), and this becomes the standard terminology. Scotus treats the terms as synonyms. ¹⁹ See Scotus, Ord. III, d. 7, q. 1, n. 9 (Vatican ed., IX, 64–5); also (and more explicitly) Scotus, Rep. III, d. 7, q. 1, n. 2 (ed. L. Wadding, 12 vols (Lyons, 1639), 446b–447a). ²⁰ See classically Reinhard Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch: zur Lehre von der Person Christi bei den Ockhamisten und bei Luther’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 63 (1966), 289–351.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



9

as communicable (since this substance is the being of that to which it is communicated), the dependence only ends with the latter.²¹

What Scotus means is that there is an ontological relationship—dependence— between ‘an accident’ of Christ and his human nature (‘the singular as communicable’); and that (on the face of it) in virtue of the dependence of the human nature on the Word, the dependence of the accident ‘piggybacks’ on the human nature to depend on the divine person (the ‘singular as incommunicable’). Scotus does not make clear whether or not this latter dependence relation is itself also supposed to be construed as a metaphysical relation or merely a linguistic one: whether the Word ontologically bears his human accidents, or whether he is merely linguistically characterized by them. As we shall see, a great deal turns, in the Reformation debates, on how this dependence relation—between the accidents of Christ’s human nature and the divine person—should be construed: that is to say, whether the Word bears his human accidents, or is merely characterized by them. Both of these options, of course, are compatible with supposital union. And, as we shall see, those theologians who believe that the relation should be understood in a metaphysical way disagree quite sharply on the structure of the relation, depending on their prior views on the relation between the human nature and the divine person. (I have not, however, come across a thinker who unequivocally holds that they are borne directly by the divine person without being borne by the human nature.)²² In what follows, I use ‘property’ to pick out these kinds of features—the additional features that a substance has over and above its having or being such-and-such an essence or nature, or being of such-and-such a species. In terms of the traditional categorization of types of predicate deriving from Porphyry (233–305)—genus, species, specific difference, proprium, and accident (the so-called ‘predicables’)—I from now on use ‘property’ to pick out both (contingent) accidents and propria, things that follow automatically from a given nature without being included in it (as a capacity for laughter follows from human nature, to take the classic example);²³ and I also use it to pick out divine attributes

²¹ Scotus, Quodlibetum, q. 19, n. 13 (Wadding ed., XII, 503). ²² The closest a theologian comes to asserting this is as far as I know the Lutheran Joachim Mörlin (1514–71), who held that ‘neither the divine nor human nature does or suffers anything, but the person (who is God and man) suffers and does everything’, and that ‘Christ sometimes used (adhibebat) his flesh as a cooperator (cooperatricem)’ in this activity: Disputatio de communicatione idiomatum, th. 41, 42, 48 (n. pl., 1571 (fol. Aiiiv)). But Mörlin’s practice seems to allow for locutions which predicate properties of natures, so it is not clear how strong his commitment to his principle actually is. For another possible instance, see the discussion in Chapter 4, n. 91 below, of a 1569 disputed question. ²³ See Porphyry, Isag. (ed. A. Busse, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV/1 (Berlin, Reimer, 1887), 1.3-4; ET in Paul Vincent Spade (ed. and trans.), Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), 1 (§1)). The Christological usage I adopt here follows the example of Cyril (as summarized by Siddals a couple of pages back). Porphyry derives his list from Aristotle, replacing Aristotle’s definition with species and difference. (For Aristotle’s account, see Topica I, c. 4 (101b17–25).)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

10

 

as such. (Note that my uses of the term ‘property’ earlier in this chapter were not thus restricted.) ‘Property’ strikes me as the best neutral translation of the Greek ‘idioma’—and it is the Christological communication of such idiomata that is the subject of this book. And in adopting this practice, I have a precedent in Martin Luther (1483–1546), who does something similar. Luther offers a representative, if characteristically colourful, list of such properties: ‘Idioma’ means that which attaches to (anhangt) a nature or is its property (eigenschafft), such as dying, suffering, weeping, speaking, laughing, eating, drinking, sleeping, sorrowing, rejoicing, being born, having a mother, suckling the breast, walking, standing, working, sitting, lying down, and other things of that kind, which are called idiomata humanae naturae, that is, properties (eigenschafft) that belong to a human being by nature, which he can and must do or even suffer; for an idioma (in Greek), a proprium (in Latin), is a thing—let us for the time being call it a ‘property (eigenschafft)’. Again, an idioma deitatis, a property (eigenschafft) of divine nature, is that it is immortal, omnipotent, infinite, not born, does not eat, drink, sleep, stand, walk, sorrow, weep.²⁴

Here Luther gives examples not only of divine attributes, but also of both propria and accidents from Porphyry’s list. One remaining point. If we suppose that there are particular natures—for example, that Christ possessed a particular human nature—then we might be forgiven for wondering why not every such item is itself a person or suppositum. Consider, for instance, Boethius’s (480–524) widely cited definition of ‘person’ as ‘individual substance of rational nature’.²⁵ Christ’s human nature seems to satisfy this definition. Again, the theory—a theory of subsistence—received its most refined formulation in the thought of Duns Scotus: required for being a person is not being sustained, in the sense outlined, by another person. This is a very strong way of securing that persons are the kinds of thing that ‘cannot be properties of anything else’, as suggested above. So Christ’s human nature fails to be a person or hypostasis.²⁶ Given this, it is to my mind odd that adherents of the supposital-union theory in its Scotist guise tend to speak of the human nature as something that subsists:

My authors frequently refer to the predicables, as we shall see; and when they do so, it is Porphyry’s list they have in mind. For a thorough discussion of Lutheran theories of the predicables in relation to Christology, see the treatment of Balthasar Meisner’s early seventeenth-century account in Walter Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen theologie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, Calwer Theologische Monographien, 4 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1976), 36–61. ²⁴ Luther, Von den Konz., WA, L, 587.22–31; LW, XLI, 100–1. ²⁵ Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, c. 4 (Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, ed. C. Moreschini, Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000), 219.271–2). ²⁶ See my Metaphysics of the Incarnation, ch. 15.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



11

‘subsisting in the divine person’, as William of Ockham (1287–1347) puts it.²⁷ Again, the locution originates in Scotus.²⁸ On the face of it, it would be more natural to speak, with Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74), of the person as something that ‘subsists in a nature’²⁹—and not the other way round—since to subsist is to be a suppositum.³⁰ I do not have much to say about this now, other than to note it as a puzzle, though it will crop up occasionally in what follows.³¹ The question of subsistence sometimes crops up in Reformation thought, and I discuss it briefly at the appropriate junctures. Strictly speaking, Scotus adds a modal requirement: not merely failing to be sustained by another person, but naturally being such—having a natural inclination or aptitude for such failure. Ockham omits this modal requirement, and it is Ockham’s version that we most frequently find in the writers I discuss in later chapters.³²

0.2 Christological Semantics and the Communicatio Idiomatum In this section I offer a brief taxonomy of Christological semantics, with a view to distinguishing the approaches of the various theologians I consider in this book. The taxonomy is by no means exhaustive; as we shall see in subsequent chapters, it needs supplementing to capture the details of various theologians’ views. But it will provide a useful preliminary way of conceptualizing the issues. I also consider in detail the question of the communicatio itself, and some of the ways in which it has been defined and understood.

0.2.1 Options for Christological Semantics As I just spelled out the supposital union, it consists in the Word bearing a human nature. There are various ways in which the theory could be further developed. ²⁷ Ockham, Rep. III, q. 1 (Opera theologica, ed. I. Lalor and others, 10 vols (St Bonaventure, NY: St Bonaventure University Press, 1967–86), VI, 34.6). ²⁸ See e.g. Scotus, Lect. III, d. 2, q. 1, n. 43 (Vatican ed., XX, 91); I quote another relevant text below. ²⁹ Aquinas, ST III, q. 16, a. 12 ad 1 (I use the text of Aquinas’s works edited by Robert Busa, at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html). ³⁰ See e.g. Scotus, Ord. III, d. 6, q. 1, n. 31 (Vatican ed., IX, 241). ³¹ I mention this in part because a central focus of some seventeenth-century debates—which I do not have space to examine here—is the relation of the human nature’s enhypostasia (its existence or subsistence in the person of the Word) and its anhypostasia (its lacking its own subsistence). On the debate, see helpfully U. M. Lang, ‘Anhypostatos-Enhypostatos: Church Fathers, Protestant Orthodoxy, and Karl Barth’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 49 (1998), 630–57. On the subsistence of the human nature, as outlined in some later Lutheran theology, see Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik, 114–23. The terminological decisions of the early fourteenth century had an indirect bearing on the way the seventeenth-century debate worked out, one that I hope to explore in greater detail elsewhere. ³² For Ockham, see my Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 302.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

12

 

According to Scotus, for example, as we have seen, this human nature itself bears human properties, and in virtue of these relationships the Word is characterized by human properties—human properties are predicated of the Word. Timothy Pawl has recently shown how to develop a semantics for Christological predication—presupposing Chalcedonian Christology—that allows us to see how Christological predications can be true even in the case that the divine person fails to bear the properties expressed by these predications. His proposal, more or less, is that in the predication ‘Christ φs’ what the predicate means is ‘has a nature that φs’. So, ‘Christ is passible’ means that Christ has a nature ‘that it is possible for some other thing to causally affect’, and ‘Christ is impassible’ means that Christ has a nature ‘that it is impossible for some other thing to causally affect’.³³ Pawl’s aim is to show how to circumvent potential Christological contradictions: for example, ‘Christ is impassible’ and ‘Christ is passible’. On Pawl’s proposal, ‘Christ is impassible’ and ‘Christ is passible’ are not contradictories, since what each amounts to is that Christ has a nature that has the relevant property. The negation of ‘Christ is passible’ is not ‘Christ is impassible’ (which on the semantics is consistent with ‘Christ is passible’), but ‘It is not the case that Christ is passible’—Christ does not have a nature that is passible—which contradicts ‘Christ has a nature that is passible’. As I shall show, the core debate in Reformation Christology turns on whether or not something like Pawl’s semantic proposal is Christologically acceptable. For clarity, I shall follow the Medieval theologians in dividing possible Christological predicates into two classes, which I label ‘trivial’ and ‘non-trivial’. A trivial Christological predicate, as I am using the term here, is one that specifies the ontological relation between a suppositum and its nature or properties, or vice versa—for example, ‘is a nature’, ‘is sustained by the Word’, ‘sustains a human nature’. Some of these predicates ‘express the union of the nature to the person’, as Duns Scotus puts it.³⁴ A good example would be the human nature’s being assumed, which, as Aquinas notes, ‘belongs to the human nature not in virtue of the suppositum but in virtue of itself ’³⁵—by which Aquinas means that its being assumed is in some sense necessary to the nature. All other predicates are nontrivial.³⁶ Examples: ‘is passible’, ‘is impassible’, ‘died’, ‘lived’, ‘raised Lazarus from the dead’. In what follows, I am interested only in non-trivial Christological

³³ Timothy Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 159. Pawl’s interests lie in providing definitions for Christological predicates, and his definitions provide synonyms for ‘passible’ and ‘impassible’ presumably so as to avoid including the definiendum in the definition. But, as we shall see in a moment, I am interested merely in the truth conditions of Christological predications, and do not need to be so scrupulous about such niceties. ³⁴ Scotus, Ord. III, d. 7, q. 2, n. 54 (Vatican ed., IX, 282–3). ³⁵ Aquinas, ST III, q. 16, a. 4 ad 3. ³⁶ Strictly speaking, ‘all other non-gerrymandered predicates or disjunctive predicates’. My theologians ignore these, so I likewise ignore them in what follows.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



13

predication, thus understood. Note too that in both cases, as these examples make clear, what gets characterized can in principle be a nature or a person. I shall talk of ‘nature-predication’ and ‘hypostasis-predication’ to make clear what I mean in particular cases. As already suggested, Pawl’s account of the semantics of Christological predication is very important for understanding Reformation debates on the communicatio idiomatum. Pre-modern thinkers tend to deal with questions of the meaning of syntactically complex items (be they sentences or something else) by specifying the truth conditions for such complexes. So, in the spirit of such semantic theories, we can think of the semantics of Christological locutions by defining those locutions with phrases that express their truth conditions.³⁷ Now, the list of non-trivial predicates will include all accidents and propria in Porphyry’s scheme of predicables, and divine attributes. So using ‘φ’ to signify any such non-trivial predicate (a usage I adopt in what follows), we can express Pawl’s semantics as follows: P-semantics:

‘x is φ’ =def ‘x has a nature that is φ’.

(P-semantics for (a slight variant on) ‘Pawl’s semantics’.) In this and later principles, I use inverted commas to pick out specifically components of the definition as such, in distinction from any metaphysical extensions of the definition. Pawl claims that his position reflects the teaching of at least some of the Early Church theologians. Consider what Cyril of Alexandria says in his Second Letter to Nestorius: When we say he suffered and rose again, [it is] not that God the Word suffered blows, nail-piercings or other wounds in his own nature (the divine is impassible because it is incorporeal), but that since his own created body suffered these things, he himself suffered for our sake, the point being that within the suffering body was the impassible.³⁸

Here, Cyril gives something strikingly like the semantics proposed by Pawl—and no surprise, since Pawl quotes this passage in support of his view.³⁹ As the context makes clear, Cyril is fully aware that this semantics can deal with putative Christological contradictions. We find something similar in Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373), in relation to the hypostatic union conceived along the lines of the soul–body union: The properties of the flesh are said to be his [viz. the Word’s], since he was in it, such as to hunger, to thirst, to suffer, to weary, and the like, of which the flesh

³⁷ I am grateful to JT Paasch for this discussion of this approach. ³⁸ Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius, c. 5 (Wickham, 7, slightly altered). ³⁹ Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology, 23.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

14

  is capable.⁴⁰ . . . When the flesh suffered, the Word was not external to it; and therefore is the passion said to be his. . . . It became the Lord, in putting on human flesh, to put it on whole with the affections proper to it; that, as we say that the body was his own, so also we may say that the affections of the body were proper to him alone. . . . If then the body had been another’s, to him too had been the affections attributed; but if the flesh is the Word’s (for ‘the Word became flesh’), of necessity then the affections also of the flesh are ascribed to him whose flesh it is.⁴¹

The idea is that, in standard cases of soul–body unity, the body’s passions are predicated of the soul (here the ‘person’) to which the body properly belongs. So in the case of the Incarnation, bodily passions can be predicated of the Word without being borne by that person. These texts are principally about passions. But another authoritative text canonized at Chalcedon, Pope Leo I’s (d. 461) so-called Tome, the letter to Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople (d. 449), extends non-trivial nature-predication to activities too: ‘The activity of each form is what is proper to it in communion with the other: that is, the Word performs what belongs to the Word, and the flesh accomplishes what belongs to the flesh. The one performs brilliant miracles, the other sustains acts of violence.’⁴² I assume that we can generalize to other kinds of predicates too, as Pawl does. (And note that this text from Leo shows that the Chalcedonian decree as a whole is to be interpreted as positing that Christ’s human nature is a particular, not a universal.) Thus far Pawl. The fullest account that I have found of a semantics like that proposed by Pawl can be found in Gabriel Biel (1420–95). As for Pawl, the context is an attempt to resolve Christological contradictions—Biel lists as potential predicates ‘man’, ‘bodily’, mortal’, ‘temporal’, passible’, ‘walking’, ‘eating’, ‘sleeping’, ‘God’, ‘omnipotent’, ‘creator’, ‘eternal’, ‘immutable’, incorruptible’,⁴³ relevant pairs of which can be ‘privatively opposed’ to each other without being ‘contradictorily opposed’. Biel’s strategy is to analyse predications such as ‘a suppositum is impassible’ as ‘a suppositum has an impassible nature’. And he expressly contrasts this with one according to which ‘a suppositum is impassible’ means ‘a suppositum does not have a passible nature’. The first meaning, of course, avoids the potential Christological contradiction. Biel concludes: [The terms] are defined in these ways: the ‘impassible’ is a suppositum subsisting in an impassible nature; the ‘immortal’ is a suppositum subsisting in an immortal ⁴⁰ Athanasius, Or. cont. Ar. III, c. 31 (PG, 26, col. 389A; ET Athanasius, Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 410b). ⁴¹ Athanasius, Or. cont. Ar. III, c. 32 (PG, 26, col. 398C, 392AB; NPNF, second series, v. 4, 411a–b). ⁴² Leo, Epistula ad Flavianum (Epistula 28), in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, I, *79. ⁴³ Biel, Coll., ed. W. Werbeck and U. Hofmann, 5 vols (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973–92), III, d. 7, q. un., a. 2 (III, 159.50–160.1).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



15

nature. Whence, just as the same suppositum can subsist in two natures, one of which is mortal, and the other immortal, so the same suppositum can be mortal and immortal. Therefore what are privatively opposed do not pertain to the same thing according to the same nature; they can, however, pertain to the same thing according to diverse natures.⁴⁴

This Biel-Pawl semantics is neutral as to the metaphysical relations picked out (or not) by ‘has a nature’ and ‘is φ’. To make progress in my analysis of the various different Reformation views, I shall need to make some more specific claims. And making such claims immediately gets problematic, because the cases of the relations between the divine person and the divine nature and attributes, on the one hand, and of the relations between the divine person and the human nature and attributes, on the other, are quite different from each other, and factoring this difference into the various semantic principles makes things rather complex. In the kind of view of the former case accepted by my thinkers, originating from Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the divine person is linguistically characterized by the divine nature and attributes not by ontologically bearing those features, but by being in some sense the same as them (and, indeed, on this view, as usually understood, the divine essence and attributes are themselves simply speaking identical).⁴⁵ In the latter case, however, that of the divine person and his human nature and properties, the characterizing relation, according to most of my thinkers, tracks some kind of ontological bearing relation: the person in some sense bears the human nature, and that nature in turn bears human attributes— much as in the account from Scotus given in the previous subsection. (There are theologians who would not put the matter quite like this; I examine them in Chapters 2 and 4.) So in what follows I use ‘have’ equivocally for both of these possible relations (sameness, bearing), and use ‘bear’ when I have in mind specifically the latter, the kind of relation that Scotus characterized as sustaining and depending (with or without inherence). Given this, we might think of developing Pawl’s semantics in the following kind of way (mine, not his): N-semantics:

‘Christ is φ’ =def ‘Christ has a nature n, and n has φ-ness’.

(N-semantics for ‘nature semantics’.) Note, as just pointed out, that ‘having’ here, in relation to the divine nature and attributes, means ‘is in some sense the same as’, and in relation to the human nature and properties means ‘bears’. Now, in allowing (in principle) quantification over properties, something which I need to spell out the differences between different Reformation views, but which ⁴⁴ Biel, Coll. III, d. 7, q. un. (III, 161.43–9). Pawl discusses this text in detail in his ‘Explosive Theology: A Reply to Jc Beall’s “Christ—A Contradiction” ’, Journal of Analytic Theology, forthcoming. ⁴⁵ See e.g. Augustine, De trin. VI, c. 4, n. 6, ll. 16–19 (ed. W. Mountain, 2 vols, CCSL, 50 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 234).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

16

 

does not form part of Pawl’s presentation, N-semantics makes some additional commitments about fundamentality not involved in P-semantics. What I mean by calling a predication ‘fundamental’ is that that it maps the world with maximal accuracy: its subject picks out something that exists, and its predicate expresses an ontological property borne by that thing.⁴⁶ Using ‘φp’ here (and in what follows) to signify an accident or proprium in Porphyry’s scheme of predicables, N-semantics requires that Christ’s being φp entails that the human nature bears the property expressed by ‘φp’. But that is much too restrictive. We should not want to exclude the possible truth of Christological predications for cases of co-extensive predicates in which the bearing relation is tied to just one of the predicates, or for cases in which the predicates are related as determinable to determinate. For example, in Medieval and some Early Modern theories of light, the predicates ‘is visible’ and ‘is coloured’ are coextensive, such that the former is reducible to the latter, and if either property is borne by the subject, it is (on the face of it) the latter—the predication ‘x is visible’ is made true simply by x’s being coloured. And, furthermore, the predicate ‘is coloured’ is a determinable of (e.g.) ‘is pink’: a pink thing is coloured in virtue of being pink, and it is only the latter property that is in fact borne by the subject—the predication ‘x is coloured’ is made true in this case simply by x’s being pink. I do not intend to exclude cases such as these (‘is visible’, ‘is coloured’) from the class of true predications if these predications are to be analysed along the lines of N-semantics. So let me rephrase N-semantics in a way that takes account of this, using ‘Φ-ness’ to signify the property had or borne by x such that x’s having or bearing Φ-ness explains the truth of ‘x is φ’: NF-semantics:

‘Christ is φ’ =def ‘Christ has a nature n, and n has Φ-ness’.

(NF-semantics for ‘nature + fundamentality semantics’.) In fundamental predications, ‘φ’ expresses Φ. Unmodified NF-semantics does not secure one of the implicit Cyrilline metaphysical desiderata, namely that the divine person does not ontologically bear his human properties. So we need to add a metaphysical extension, to the effect that Christ does not bear his human properties. For convenience I shall refer to the conjunction of NF-semantics and this metaphysical extension as CN-semantics (‘Cyril’s nature semantics’; and here and in what follows ‘φp’ is related to ‘Φp’ as ‘φ’ is to ‘Φ’):⁴⁷

⁴⁶ Note that, provided we do not make inherence a requirement for fundamentality, predicates expressing properties had by piggybacking are fundamental. The same will go for any predicate expressing a property jointly borne by two objects that are the same person without being identical. ⁴⁷ This proposal is, I think, broadly within the spirit of Porphyry’s account. Porphyry analyses each Aristotelian category as a hierarchy of determinable and determinate, from the most general genera (the categories themselves) to the most specific species, the latter of which are ‘predicated immediately of individuals’ (Porphyry, Isag., 4.24; Spade, 4 (§23); for the whole discussion, see Isag., 4.5–6.7; Spade, 4–5 (§§21–9)).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



17

CN-semantics: ‘Christ is φ’ =def ‘Christ has a nature n, and n has Φ-ness’; and Christ is φp only if it is not the case that Christ bears Φp-ness. I add the final clause because, as we shall see, CN-semantics is contrasted with one according to which the divine person does indeed bear not only his human nature (as in CN-semantics) but also his human properties. As we shall see, among others both the Reformed theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) and the Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz (1522–86) appeal to the very text from Cyril quoted on p. 13 in support of N-semantics and its metaphysical extension (expressed jointly in CN-semantics).⁴⁸ For convenience, I label this text ‘CN’—since it is found in a letter from Cyril to Nestorius. On one plausible reading, we can find all of the components of CN-semantics adumbrated in Scotus—though it must be said that generally speaking the discussion of these predications and their semantics is more fully developed in the sixteenth-century sources than it is in Medieval ones. Scotus is ambivalent on the claim that human properties are borne by the divine person (along with his human nature). The text from his Quodlibet that I quoted above suggests that Scotus has an ontological relation in mind, and thus that bearing is transitive. But his explicit treatment of the semantics seems to align him more with CNsemantics. The clearest account can be found in his theory of the truth conditions for predications ascribing human activity to the divine person. Scotus claims both that Christ’s human will is the ‘cause’ of his human activity, and that this activity ‘denominates’ the second person of the Trinity in virtue of the hypostatic union. Denomination is a predication relation—the one that I have been labelling ‘characterization’. Just as in my account of CN-semantics, Scotus spells out the case by giving relevant truth conditions for the various predications: ‘How therefore is [the Word] said to will? I say that . . . he is said to will because his soul is said to will; and because the nature subsists in the Word, [the Word] is therefore denominated in this way’;⁴⁹ and, ‘The Word, and not the whole Trinity, is denominated by the operation of the created will on account of the union which results in the communication of properties (communicationem idiomatum).’⁵⁰ So this would seem to construe the dependence of human activity on the Word as a merely linguistic relation (denomination), in conformity with CN-semantics. If this is the correct reading, ‘depending’, as used by Scotus, is equivocal between

⁴⁸ Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius, c. 5 (Wickham, 7). ⁴⁹ Scotus, Rep. III, d. 17, qq. 1–2, n. 4 (Wadding ed., XI, 484a). ⁵⁰ Scotus, Ord. III, d. 17, q. un., n. 17 (Vatican ed., IX, 570). On this, see my Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 221–2; see too 198–205. It may seem surprising that I trace this view back to Scotus rather than to some earlier Scholastic thinker. The simple reason is that I cannot find systematic discussions of the kinds of cases that would conform to CN-semantics in earlier writers; neither can I find anything like an explicit affirmation of CN-semantics. But I am willing to be corrected on this. Nothing turns on it for my purposes here.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

18

 

being borne and characterizing: the nature depends on (is borne by) the person; the property depends on (characterizes) the person. In relation to the text from Athanasius quoted above, pp. 13–14, John Behr offers the following pithy summary: ‘The one “subject” is . . . to be understood in logical or grammatical terms, as a subject of predication: the one Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is spoken of as God and as human.’⁵¹ Behr distinguishes this linguistic understanding of ‘subject’ from an account of the one subject as the ontological bearer of the relevant properties. In relation to psychological properties such as suffering, Behr’s contrast is with a view that sees the subject ‘in terms of psychological content, the modern “person”, about whom it would make no sense to say that “he suffered and did not suffer” ’.⁵² It is something like this latter view that I propose to contrast to CN-semantics—a view that includes among the truth conditions for Christological predications the divine person’s bearing human properties. One way for the divine person to bear human properties would be by the ontological piggybacking described earlier: the divine person would bear human properties in virtue of bearing a nature that bears them. Crucially for my overall argument, we find this view in Luther. In its basic form, we might think of this piggybacking as involving an analysis of property-bearing relation in terms of a relation between hypostases and properties, thus: H-semantics:

‘a hypostasis x is φ’ =def ‘x has φ-ness’.

(‘H-semantics’ for ‘hypostasis semantics’.) But H-semantics is inconsistent with the possibility of true figurative predication, since given H-semantics every predicate in a true predication expresses a property had by the subject of predication. And Luther accepts the possibility of true figurative predication.⁵³ So, in a way parallel to NF-semantics, we could capture this possibility with the following proposal: HF-semantics:

‘a hypostasis x is φ’ =def ‘x has Φ-ness’.

As far as I can make out, Luther accepts that Christ bears his human nature, and he accepts piggybacking as outlined above. So Luther accepts the following metaphysical extension of HF-semantics, applied Christologically: Christ has Φp-ness iff Christ bears Φp-ness; and Christ bears Φp-ness iff (Christ bears a human nature h, and h bears Φp-ness). For convenience, I shall refer to the ⁵¹ John Behr, The Nicene Faith. Part 1: True God of True God (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Press, 2004), 228. ⁵² Behr, The Nicene Faith, 227–8. ⁵³ On this, see Anna Vind, ‘ “Christus factus est peccatum metaphorice”: Über die theologische Verwendung rhetorischer Figuren bei Luther unter Einbeziehung Quintilians’, in Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunication, Theologische Bibliothek Töpemann, 138 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007), 95–124.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



19

conjunction of HF-semantics and this metaphysical principle as LH-semantics (‘Luther’s hypostasis semantics’): LH-semantics: ‘a hypostasis x is φ’ =def ‘x has Φ-ness’; and Christ has Φp-ness iff Christ bears Φp-ness; and Christ bears Φp-ness iff (Christ bears a human nature h, and h bears Φp-ness). I provide my evidence for Luther’s acceptance of LH-semantics in Chapter 1. It strikes me that one of the major fault lines in Reformation Christological debate focuses precisely on whether or the divine person bears not only his human nature but also human properties. Luther, as we shall see, supposes that any predication of the form x is φ requires that x has Φ-ness—and thus in the case of Christ, that a predication of the form Christ is φp requires that Christ bears Φp-ness. Obviously, this requirement cannot be satisfied given CN-semantics, since CN-semantics includes the following extension: Christ is φp only if it is not the case that Christ bears Φp-ness. For Luther, then, some kind of fundamentality is a requirement for predication: specifically, ‘x is φ’ is true only if x has Φ-ness, and ‘x is φp’ is true only if x bears Φp-ness. Some of my theologians talked of ‘real’ predications in this context, and this led to considerable ambiguity, as we shall see. Someone accepting CN-semantics and its associated metaphysics would doubtless think of ‘real’ as synonymous with ‘true’; someone rejecting CNsemantics in favour of alternatives such as LH-semantics would in all likelihood think of ‘real’ as requiring something stronger: a fundamentality relation between a subject and at least some relevant predicates. So we might helpfully disambiguate: a predication is realt iff it is true; a predication ‘x is φ’ is realf iff x is Φ. Correspondingly, the communicatio is realf iff the predication expressing it is realf. As we shall see, some of my theologians hold that a predication is realt only if it is realf. The contrasting term is ‘verbal’, used by all sides to pick out, among other things, predications that fail to be realf. A theologian who held that a predication is realt only if it is realf would suppose that merely verbal predications are ipso facto false; other theologians would hold that among verbal predications are included ones that are not realf but rather realt. There is, as we shall see, much scope for misunderstanding on all sides. As the Chalcedonian decree shows, it is common (though not required) to restrict or specify Christological predications using the qua-connective, often expressed in English using qualifiers such as ‘according to’, ‘in’, ‘as’, ‘as regards’.⁵⁴ For instance, according to Chalcedon Christ is ‘truly God and truly man . . . consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity’, and that ‘he was begotten of his Father as regards ⁵⁴ For an extensive analytical history, see Allan Bäck, On Reduplication: Logical Theories of Quantification, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 49 (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1996).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

20

 

his divinity, and . . . of the Virgin Mary . . . as regards his humanity’. On both CNsemantics and LH-semantics the qua-connective would naturally be read as specifying a relevant part of the truth conditions for the Christological predication: ‘Christ suffers qua human’ would specify that it is in virtue of having a human nature that suffers that it is true that Christ suffers. It would, in short, specify the immediate bearer of the property. One further aspect of these issues needs to be kept in mind to understand the Reformation debates, and that is the tendency of some in the Reformed party, following Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), to suppose that the kinds of non-trivial Christological predication I have been talking about should be construed as ‘figures of speech’, or ‘tropes’ (on which, see section 1.3.1, pp. 73–6). We would be doing Zwingli and these others a grievous disservice if we were to suppose this claim to imply that they held these Christological predications to be eo ipso false. Zwingli, as we shall see in Chapter 1, says quite a bit about non-literal locutions. He does not spell out explicitly his assumption that such locutions can be true: perhaps he just thought it was obvious. The clearest statement of this that I have found in the theologians that are the subject of this book comes from the pen of Luther’s closest associate Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), in the third edition (1547) of his Erotemata dialectices: True predication is either regular (regularis), or figurative ( figurata), or nonstandard (inusitata). Regular is that which conforms to one mode of the five predicables. . . . Figurative is in an improper locution (sermonem) where what is asserted is nevertheless true (ubi tamen sententia vera est). . . . The third kind is non-standard, namely in propositions about the Son of God, of which there are no other examples in the whole universe of things, such as: ‘God is man’, ‘the Word is made flesh’. These do not conform to the regular ones: in other cases, we do not join disparate species, such as ‘a boar is a stag’, ‘whiteness is sound’.⁵⁵

I return to the specifics of Melanchthon’s position in Chapter 2. For now, I merely want to highlight his explicit assertion, twice made in the passage, that being figurative is no bar to being true. As we shall see, Zwingli’s view is that the truth conditions for merely figurative Christological predications are precisely those set out in CN-semantics. (LH-semantics is inconsistent with the view that all Christological predications could be figurative, since LH-semantics requires that some locutions have predicates that express a property possessed by the subject of the predication, and these cannot be figurative. Doubtless, Zwingli would include fundamental predications among the class of non-figurative predications, and would deny that any predication of the form ‘Christ is φp’ is fundamental.) It is worth noting these two central semantic principles—CN-semantics and LH-semantics—cover merely cases in which the range of possible predicates is ⁵⁵ Melanchthon, Erot. dial., CR, 13, cols. 524–5.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



21

restricted to accidents and propria in Porphyry’s scheme of predicables, and divine attributes. They thus by design exclude from their scope predications that the Scholastics refer to as predications ‘in natural matter’: for example, ‘God is man’,⁵⁶ predications in which the subject and predicate signify natural kinds. I will return to the semantics for such predications—which are largely tangential to my discussion here—at appropriate junctures below.

0.2.2 The Communicatio Idiomatum The traditional label for the Christological practice I have just been talking about is the communicatio idiomatum. This phrase specifically applies to predicating divine or human properties of the one person under a description appropriate to the other nature—‘God is passible’, for example, or ‘the man is eternal’—something that seems to be required given that a divine person genuinely became a human being. But it is worth keeping in mind that the phrase also gets used more generally to talk about hypostasis-predication as such. Here, for example, is the definition of the communicatio idiomatum in Biel: ‘The communicatio idiomatum in Christ is the mutual predication of the concrete [terms] of each nature of each other, and of the suppositum subsisting in these.’⁵⁷ On the face of it there is an ambiguity here, since Biel’s definition talks both of hypostasis-predication and of nature-predication; and, clearly, only the first of these is necessary. As it turns out the second clause here is epexegetical, as we can tell from the examples Biel goes on to give: ‘man’, as an example of a ‘concrete term of the human nature’, and ‘God’ as an example of a ‘concrete term of the divine nature’.⁵⁸ So the ‘nature[s]’ that are the ultimate subject of these predications turn out to be the person of the Word, under different descriptions associated with the different natures. Biel’s definition is admirably clear. But things are not always so tidy. The language of the communicatio was introduced by John of Damascus, whose Greek ‘antidosis tōn idiomatōn (communication of properties)’ was rendered as ‘communicatio idiomatum’ in thirteenth-century Latin. Here is what John says: ‘Such . . . is the manner of this exchange (τρόπος τῆς ἀντιδόσεως) by which each nature communicates its own properties (τὰ ἴδια) to the other through the identity of their person, and their mutual perichoresis.’⁵⁹

⁵⁶ See e.g. Aquinas, ST III, q. 16, a. 1 ad 1. ⁵⁷ Biel, Coll. III, d. 7, qu. un., art. 1 (III, 154.12–13). ⁵⁸ Biel, Coll. III, d. 7, qu. un., art. 1 (III, 154.15–16). ⁵⁹ John of Damascus, Exp. fid., c. 48, ll. 38–40 (ed. B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos: II. Expositio fidei, Patristische Texte und Studien, 12 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1973), 117; ET John of Damascus, Writings, The Fathers of the Church, trans. Frederic H. Chase (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 276).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

22

 

Note, then, that Biel’s talk of natures in this context, as meaning ‘person (in a given nature)’ (‘the mutual predication of the concrete [terms] of each nature of each other’) goes right back to John himself. The context makes it plain that John is here interested merely in the relation between the natures (and their associated properties) and the person: we can predicate of God human properties, and of a man divine properties, where ‘God’ and ‘man’ refer in the concrete to the second person of the Trinity. John’s examples are ‘This is our God, who was seen upon earth and conversed with men’, and ‘This man is uncreated, impassible, and uncircumscribed.’⁶⁰ The communicatio envisaged here is symmetrical, in the sense that each nature shares its properties or predicates with the person. Elsewhere, however, John introduces a further element: The Word makes human things his own, because what is proper to his sacred flesh belongs to him; and the things which are his own he communicates to his flesh. This is after the manner of the exchange on account of the perichoresis of the parts and the hypostatic union.⁶¹

On this view, not only are divine properties predicated of the person of the Word; they—or some of them—can be in some sense predicated of the human nature too. Here—unlike in the first case just considered—the sharing of attributes is not symmetrical: human attributes are participated in by the Word, the divine person; divine attributes, or some of them, are participated in by the human nature. So here John, in effect, gives us two independent ways of understanding the relation between divine properties and the human Christ: the person, howsoever described (the human person, the same person as the divine person), is the subject of divine properties (hence: ‘This man is uncreated, impassible, and uncircumscribed’); and the human nature is in some sense the subject of divine properties too (‘the things which are his own he communicates to the flesh’). And this gives us overall two kinds of communicatio: one in which attributes of both natures belong to the divine person; another in which the attributes of the divine nature are in some way shared with the human nature. Both of these reflect the earlier traditions of distinctively Cyrilline and Alexandrian Christology. John’s treatment of these issues—including the distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical accounts, and the distinction between union and perichoresis—turns out to be central in some Reformation debates, and quite as important as Scotus’s account of the supposital union. From the time of Chemnitz, Lutherans designated John’s symmetrical kind of communication the ‘genus idiomaticum’. (A subcategory of this genus, identified by Chemnitz as a further genus of the communicatio in its own right, is the so-called genus

⁶⁰ John, Exp. fid., c. 48, ll. 41–2 (p. 118; Chase, 276–7). The first of these is a quotation from Baruch 3:36 and 3:38. ⁶¹ John, Exp. fid., c. 47, ll. 75–81 (p. 115; Chase, 274, slightly altered).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



23

apotelesmaticum.⁶² This relates to what theologians from the time of Ps.-Dionysius (late fifth/early sixth century) onwards have classified as a particular type of incarnational activity: theandric activity. This activity is of a kind that could be done only by a person with both divine and human natures, such that both natures have a causal role in the activity: miraculously healing by touch, for example.⁶³ Since the activity is in some sense shared, some of the Lutheran theologians counted it as a kind of communicatio. It will crop up occasionally in what follows, but I do not treat it independently, for two reasons. First, while it raises some very interesting and complicated metaphysical issues—for example, how it might be that one action can supervene on two natures—few of the theologians I consider here raise these kinds of issues. Secondly, it is in principle susceptible of just the same semantic analysis as the genus idiomaticum is, at least in the theologians I discuss here. (Later theologians treat it more along the lines of the genus maiestaticum.) Supposing CN-semantics, for example, and using ‘ψ’ to designate any theandric activity, ‘Christ ψs’ means that Christ has a divine nature and a human nature that together ψ.) Chemnitz identified two different varieties of the asymmetrical kind of communicatio found in John of Damascus, in which the divine person communicates properties to the human nature. In one, the communicated attributes are identified as created habits (a kind of accidental quality) inherent in the human nature; in the other, the communicated attributes are numerically the same as those attributes in God: quite literally divine attributes. Although Chemnitz discusses the first group of these (i.e. created qualities) under the general heading of a third genus (along with the first two, the genus idiomaticum and the genus apotelesmaticum),⁶⁴ one that became known as the genus maiestaticum,⁶⁵ he sometimes restricts attributes satisfying this designation to the latter class (i.e. uncreated attributes).⁶⁶ He classifies both groups under the general heading ‘supernatural gifts’: The ὑπερφυσικά [i.e. supernatural] gifts which result from the union added nothing to the divine nature but only to the human. . . . But these gifts are either created, formal, or habitual gifts which inhere subjectively in the human nature of Christ itself, in and according to themselves, or they are the powers and activities of the divine nature itself which do not inhere formally or subjectively ⁶² See Chemnitz, De duabus naturis in Christo [1578], c. 17 ((Leipzig, 1580), 216–36; trans. J. A. O. Preus (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1971), 215–31). ⁶³ For a very clear discussion of the theological position, see Aquinas, ST III, q. 18, a. 1, ad 1 and ad 5. ⁶⁴ See Chemnitz De duabus (1578), c. 12 (p. 166; Preus, 166). ⁶⁵ Note that Chemnitz himself is not exactly responsible for the vocabulary (genus idiomaticum, genus apotelesmaticum, and genus maiestaticum), and I am not sure who is. But he is responsible for the division into three genera, and the vocabulary is a precise shorthand for the varieties of communicatio that he describes. In what follows, I shall for convenience talk of his accepting the genus idiomaticum and the genus maiestaticum, and simply adopt the terminology on his behalf. ⁶⁶ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 301; Preus, 287).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

24

  in the human nature in themselves, but have been communicated to it by the structure of the union, just as the powers of the soul are communicated to the animated body and as the power of giving heat and light is communicated to the heated iron, without any commingling or equating of the natures.⁶⁷

In what follows, I use Chemnitz’s terminology of ‘supernatural gifts’ to talk in general about both kinds of asymmetrical communication, specifying which sense I have in mind: for convenience, I talk about ‘SG-predication’ and ‘SG-possession’ in this context (for supernatural gift).⁶⁸ I follow later Lutheran teaching in restricting the terminology of the genus maiestaticum to the communication of attributes in some sense numerically the same as God’s own attributes. As Heinrich Schmid puts it in his classic nineteenth-century textbook of Lutheran orthodoxy, under the heading of the genus maiestaticum, ‘The attributes . . . which . . . are communicated to the human nature, are truly divine, and therefore to be distinguished from the special human excellences possessed by the human nature which the λόγος [i.e. Word] assumed.’⁶⁹ The genus maiestaticum raises two difficult questions that those Lutheran theologians who accepted it struggled (and I think failed) to resolve. First, what is the nature of the metaphysical relation between the divine attributes and the human nature; or, more generally, in what way are the attributes associated with the human nature such that they can be predicated of that nature? And, secondly, given that the human nature cannot bear the divine essence, and given the identity of essence and attribute in God widely accepted in the Western tradition stemming from Augustine (something that for the most part the Lutheran theologians explicitly accept), how is it possible for the human nature to bear any divine attribute? The second issue is particularly pressing since, as we shall see, the Lutheran theologians tended not only to claim that the divine essence—unlike certain divine attributes—was not communicated in the required sense, but

⁶⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578) c. 12 (p. 166; Preus, 166). The theologians I discuss frequently weave Greek into their Latin prose. When they do so, I simply transcribe the Greek, and add an explanatory translation in square brackets. An exception is any occurrence of the Greek word ‘λόγος’ (i.e. Word), which, since it crops up so frequently, I transliterate as ‘Logos’, following the sensible practice adopted by Preus in his translation of Chemnitz’s 1578 De duabus. ⁶⁸ I am aware of theoretical concerns surrounding the notion of the supernatural. No terminological choice is theoretically neutral: deification and participation are equally fraught, not least because some theologians would construe these in terms of the first of Chemnitz’s categories, and some in terms of the second. So I go with Chemnitz’s choice of terminology, aiming to be as neutral as possible, and certainly not taking it to involve commitment to a specific theory of the nature–supernature contrast, or of the nature of supernatural gifts in general. ⁶⁹ Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. by Charles A. Hay and Henry E. Jacobs, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Company, 1899), 315. See classically Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), who claims that what is given are ‘infinite immense gifts’—that is, I assume, the divine attributes themselves (Gerhard, Loci theologici, loc. V, p. 3, c. 5, §103 (vol. 1, ed. I. F. Cotta (Tübingen, 1762), 352b)). For Gerhard’s Christology, see Richard Schröder, Johann Gerhards lutherische Christologie und die aristotelische Metaphysik, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 67 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



25

also that not all of the divine attributes were communicated: eternity was not communicated, for example, whereas omnipotence was. But on standard Western views, explicitly accepted by the Lutheran theologians for the most part, these things—essence, eternity, omnipotence—are all identical. I shall label this difficulty with the genus maiestaticum the ‘Augustinian problem’. We shall have reason to return to it a number of times in what follows.⁷⁰ The problem arises only if the participated items are the ipsissima divine attributes. Medieval theologians generally reduce participation in divine attributes simply to the possession of created acts and habits in virtue of which a person is made like God in certain ways.⁷¹ Theologians who hold that Christ’s human nature bore divine attributes sometimes appeal to the distinction between the divine essence and the divine activities that they found principally in John of Damascus.⁷² But for the most part this appeal can be no more than ornamental, since however we construe the distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated things (such as activities or ‘energies’) identified by the Greek tradition as being ‘around the essence’, it is incompatible with the identity of essence and attribute posited by some key contributors to the Western tradition, since this identity includes that of essence and activity in God. As a matter of terminology, I will use talk of the genus idiomaticum and the genus maiestaticum as a way of drawing attention both to semantic issues (predication relations, and the meaning of such relations) and to metaphysical issues (questions of property-bearing and the like). In this, I follow something close to Chemnitz’s practice, as we shall see, and also close to what we find in Jakob Andreae (1528–90). But I shall talk in this way only with care, because we shall encounter many Lutheran texts in which the linguistic relation and the metaphysical relation come apart: notably, in cases in which the divine attributes are borne by the nature without being predicated of it. For example, the later Chemnitz, and for some period in his early career Andreae, hold that Christ’s human nature can have or possess omnipotence or omniscience (it can be communicated to that nature) without it being true that the human nature is omnipotent or omniscient.

⁷⁰ Among medieval thinkers, Scotus (and his numerous followers) adopts a view on divine simplicity that distances itself from Augustinianism: Scotus’s position that there is a formal distinction between the divine essence and attributes, and between the various divine attributes themselves. In support of his account, Scotus expressly appeals to passages from John of Damascus that I have just mentioned. He identifies the divine essence as ipsum esse subsistens, and distinguishes it from every divine attribute. But Scotus maintains that the divine essence and attributes, while formally distinct (non-identical), are ‘really the same’—and the criterion for real sameness is inseparability. So Scotus’s view would not in fact provide the Lutherans with the help needed to deal with the Augustinian problem. On Scotus’s view and its relation to both Augustine and John of Damascus, see my ‘Duns Scotus on God’s Essence and Attributes: Metaphysics, Semantics, and the Greek Patristic Tradition’, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales, 83 (2016), 353–83. ⁷¹ See (e.g.) my treatment of Aquinas in ‘Aquinas on Deification: Created or Uncreated?’ Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 69 (2018), 106–32. ⁷² On the distinction, see e.g. John, Exp. fid., c. 4, ll. 26–7, 33–6 (p. 13; Chase, 172).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

26

 

The reason is that both thinkers hold predication to track not the possession of a divine power but the exercise of such a power, as we shall see. In cases in which the linguistic and the metaphysical come apart, I shall be careful to specify which relation I have in mind. Bearing without predication may seem curious, but there are analogous cases. Aristotle holds something like this in the case of matter and substantial form: Socrates’s matter bears his human form, but the form is predicated of Socrates, not the matter.⁷³ Aquinas perhaps adopts something similar in regard to the general relation between a human soul and the person of which the soul is a part: ‘the soul thinks’, but this activity is properly predicated not of the soul but of the human person who possesses the soul, since ‘operations of the parts are attributed to the whole’.⁷⁴ What we would need in such cases are criteria to ground such a caesura between the metaphysical and the linguistic (different from the criteria which would enable us to posit predication in the absence of a corresponding bearing relation, as in my discussion of fundamentality above). In section 0.1 above I drew attention to two ways in which theologians have attempted to model the metaphysics of the Incarnation, dependent on whether or not they take the hypostatic union as a basic relation in the Incarnation, or ground it on some prior relation. As we shall see, part of the debate between the various parties in the discussions I describe later in this book has to do with the precise relationship between, on the one hand, the metaphysics of the Incarnation, and, on the other, the communicatio idiomatum. Theologians who assume the hypostatic union to be basic typically model it along the lines of the soul–body unity. I mentioned above that this account by itself fails adequately to model both the way in which the person is God and man, and the way in which the divine person is supposed to be the subject of both divine and human properties as such. The cause of the deficit is the same in both of these cases: the union of soul and body models well the union of two natures in one person, but some further ontological component is required to ground the Christologically relevant predication relations. So we might think of the soul–body model as requiring two distinct metaphysical stages, each providing a distinct explanatory component: the hypostatic union or union of natures, along with an additional basic relation, a predication-grounding relation in virtue of which the person is the subject of non-trivial Christological predicates—where the predications to be explained include all cases of the communicatio idiomatum, along with predications ‘in natural matter’ in which a nature (and not a property of the nature as such) is ascribed to a person. For convenience I shall refer to such an ordering as a ‘UC-ordering’: the logical ordering of the metaphysical stages in the union and ⁷³ See for example Aristotle, Physica, I, c. 7 (190a36); though for the opposite view, see Aristotle, Metaphysica, Ζ, c. 3 (1029a18–19). ⁷⁴ Aquinas, ST I, q. 75, a. 2 ad 2.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



27

communicatio. A model taking these two components as basic thus exhibits the following UC-ordering: (hypostatic union + hypostasis-as-subject), using ‘hypostasis-as-subject’ as a shorthand way of referring to the hypostasis’s being subject of the human nature and properties. Since the first stage is merely a necessary condition for the second, I shall talk of this kind of ordering as a nonexplanatory two-stage UC-ordering, such that both components in this account are in some sense explanatorily basic. It is a notable fact that few theologians who take the hypostatic union as basic give any account of the second component here. Among the authors I consider in this book, only Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) and his followers accept this kind of view. And one of the things that is both significant and satisfying in Brenz’s view—at least if my interpretation is correct—is that he does indeed find a way of deriving the second stage from the first. The supposital union does not suffer from the problem of explaining the subjecthood (so to speak) of the divine hypostasis. The supposital union is sufficient to ensure the identity of the referents of ‘God’ and ‘man’. Now, identity, as I noted above, satisfies the principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (that if x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y—here that whatever is true of the Son of God is true of the Son of Man and vice versa), so the supposital union is sufficient to secure, first, the truth both of Christological predications ‘in natural matter’ and of all cases of the communicatio idiomatum, and, secondly, the union of natures (in virtue of their both being united to the divine person). So unlike the soul–body model, we might think of the supposital union as an explanatory two-stage UC-ordering. The scenario looks something like this (using ‘!’ here and below to mean something like ‘sufficiently explains’): (supposital union ! (hypostatic union + hypostasis-as-subject)). Note that generally, but not always, the metaphysical stages of a UC-ordering are correlated to linguistic predication relations too. I shall be careful to note when they fail to be. I mention these distinctions now because, as we shall see, the question of the precise metaphysical ordering of the various possible relations (union of subsistence, union of natures, communicatio idiomatum) became quite intensely disputed in the second half of the sixteenth century, largely connected with theoretical gaps found (by himself and others) in Brenz’s account.⁷⁵

0.3 The Distinction between Concrete and Abstract Many of the theologians I discuss in what follows present the distinction between persons and natures in terms of a distinction between concrete and abstract: in particular, that persons are standardly referred to by concrete nouns, and natures

⁷⁵ For a summary of the various UC-orderings, see Table 1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

28

 

by abstract. But the linguistic distinction does not evidently track any of the available metaphysical distinctions, and we need to take account of this before proceeding. For example, suppose we think of a concrete object as one that is subject to nontrivial properties. All of my theologians hold that Christ’s human nature is subject to non-trivial properties, and so would accept that in this sense the human nature is a concrete object. Equally, all of my theologians hold that it or its parts can be signified by concrete nouns. While many (not all) theologians in the Middle Ages and Reformation are careful not to refer to Christ’s human nature as a man (concrete), nevertheless, it is natural to use concrete nouns to refer to particulars and their parts. And it is standard in the whole Chalcedonian tradition (and before) to talk about Christ’s body and soul, for example: parts of his human nature. But all of this notwithstanding, the Reformation theologians standardly follow the Schoolmen in distinguishing between predication in concreto and predication in abstracto, such that hypostasis-predication is predication in concreto, and nature-predication predication in abstracto—whether the nature is de facto signified by an abstract or a concrete noun (e.g. ‘humanity’; ‘body’). And the Reformation theologians were far more sensitive than the Medieval ones to the fact that parts of the human nature can be signified by concrete nouns. A natural move to make would maintain that the concrete/abstract distinction is something merely logical. We shall see in a moment a theologian making just such a move, specifically by maintaining that there is a technical Christological sense of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ which relates merely to the semantics (and syntax) of Christological predications, and tracks neither the metaphysical distinction (according to which the hypostasis and natures in Christ are all concrete) nor the linguistic (since some of the items pertaining to a nature are signified by linguistically concrete nouns). Now, to understand the semantics of concrete and abstract nouns in the Christological context, we need to know a little more about the general semantics of such nouns. And all my thinkers (barring Brenz and his followers) basically presuppose a kind of semantics that we find in different forms in the Scholastic theologians. These thinkers talked about questions of meaning and reference by appeal to two distinct semantic relationships: signification and supposition. Here is a characteristically crisp account in Aquinas, discussing Christological predications ‘in natural matter’: A noun signifying a common nature in the concrete can supposit for each of the things contained in the common nature, just as this noun ‘man’ can supposit for each singular man. And so this noun ‘God’, from the manner of its signification, can supposit for the person of the Son of God . . . But a noun signifying the nature in the concrete can be truly and really predicated of each suppositum in that nature, just as ‘man’ is truly and properly predicated of Socrates and Plato. Since,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



29

therefore, the person of the Son of God—for whom this noun ‘God’ supposits—is a suppositum of human nature, this noun ‘man’ can truly and properly be predicated of the noun ‘God’ inasmuch as it supposits for the person of the Son of God.⁷⁶

Signification is something like meaning, but with a psychological component: the signification of a term is what it brings to mind. According to Aquinas, naturalkind substantives, concrete or abstract, bring to mind natural kinds—natures. ‘Man’ makes us think of the kind man; ‘God’ makes us think of the ‘kind’ God. (I put ‘kind’ in scare quotes here because God is not quite a kind in the sense of created natural-kinds; but note Aquinas’s ‘God is the name of a nature.’)⁷⁷ According to Aquinas, concrete natural-kind substantives signify the nature while neither including nor excluding its supposita; abstract natural-kind substantives standardly signify it while excluding its supposita.⁷⁸ Aquinas does not make the point that linguistically concrete nouns signifying parts of the natures (e.g. ‘body’) behave like abstract nouns; but as we will see in a moment, this idea is made explicit in the Reformation discussions. The second semantic relationship that Aquinas mentions in the quoted passage is supposition. Supposition is the reference that a term has in a given sentential context: here, any instantiation of the nature—a ‘suppositum in a nature’. Obviously, a term’s signification restricts its supposition. Since according to Aquinas ‘God’ and ‘man’ as the subjects of the relevant Christological locutions supposit for supposita, and since, given the hypostatic union, the item supposited for by the subject term is an instance of the form or nature signified by the predicate term in the target locution (‘God is man’), it follows that this locution (and, for that matter, ‘a man is God’) is true.⁷⁹ The nicest discussion of the whole concrete/abstract issue that I have found is in the Lutheran Tilman Hesshus (1527–88).⁸⁰ Hesshus devotes a whole section of his treatise De duabus naturis in Christo to the concrete/abstract distinction in the Christological context, supposing natures to be concrete objects that are nevertheless properly signified only by abstract nouns. He notes that the ‘Scholastics’ and Melanchthon used the terms ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ as ‘terms of art’, defining

⁷⁶ Aquinas, ST III, q. 16, a. 1 c. ⁷⁷ Aquinas, ST I, q. 8, a. 1, sed contra. ⁷⁸ Aquinas, De ente, c. 2. I say ‘standardly’ because the Christological case introduces a certain messiness. As Aquinas sees it, Christ’s human nature is a particular, an ‘individual in the genus of substance’ (Aquinas, ST III, q. 2, a. 2 ad 3), and Aquinas treats this individual as the subject of substantive Christological predication: the nature is ‘visible’, for example (Aquinas, ST III, q. 8, a. 1 ad 3). But let that pass. ⁷⁹ See e.g. Aquinas, ST III, q. 16, a. 8 ad 4; for the general principle, see I, q. 13, a. 12 c. For ‘a man is God’, see Aquinas, ST III, q. 16, a. 2. ⁸⁰ For a thorough account of Hesshus’s Christology, see Thilo Krüger, Empfangene Allmacht: Die Christologie Tilemann Heshusens (1527–1588), Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, 87 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). I deal with some aspects of Hesshus’s Christology in Chapter 3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

30

 

them in terms of the supposition of instances of such names.⁸¹ Thus he quotes the Dominican theologian Durand of St Pourçain (c. 1270–1334) to the effect that ‘a concrete [term] supposits for a person; an abstract one supposits for a nature’:⁸² any term that supposits for the person is concrete; any term that supposits for a nature is abstract, irrespective of its linguistic form.⁸³ Hesshus claims that ‘abstract’ here is a term of ‘second intention’.⁸⁴ What he means is that being abstract in the required sense is a feature not of anything in the world, but merely of a concept or a word.⁸⁵ Whatever it is to be abstract in this sense is not a feature of Christ’s human nature or its parts. Hesshus clearly supposes Christ’s human nature and its parts to be concrete particular objects— concrete in the sense of being subject of non-trivial properties: being human, being 140lbs, for example (as opposed to being a subject of . . . , being a property of . . . : trivial properties). All of my thinkers assume that the human nature its parts are concrete particular objects in this sense. But many of them would have dissented from Hesshus’s claim that there are no abstract objects. Properties (in my Porphyrian sense) might generally count as such objects—items not subject to further (non-trivial) predicates. (If this is the correct reading of Hesshus, he would seem to be committed here to an austere one-category ontology, according to which only concrete substances and their concrete material parts exist. As we shall see in Chapter 3, this is not in fact his considered view.) Setting this aside, the theologians I discuss here almost universally accept that Christ’s human nature is a concrete object in the sense of being a subject of nontrivial properties. So we should not be misled by claims about predication in abstracto into thinking that the subject of predication is itself an abstract object in the sense just outlined: that, I take it, is part of Hesshus’s point. Anyone who allows SG-predication permits predication in abstracto, as do those who accept CN-semantics and LH-semantics. What is at stake in at least some of the discussions of the genus maiestaticum is whether Christ’s human nature is the subject of divine (as well as human) properties. The bars on predication in abstracto that we shall see in what follows are bars simply on this kind of predication, not on SGpredication more generally. I assume, too, that someone who imagined the soul– body analogy to be a good one for the hypostatic union would be very likely to think (reflectively or unreflectively) of the human nature as a concrete object, a

⁸¹ Hesshus, De duabus in Christo naturis (Magdeburg, 1590), fols. H1v–H2r; see also fol. H4r. ⁸² Hesshus, De duabus, fol. H2r, referring to Durand, In sententias theologicas commentariorum libri IIII (2 vols (Venice, 1571)), III, d. 12, q. 2, n. 5 (II, 233b)). ⁸³ For similar points, made without appeal to supposition-theory, see Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 24 (p. 362; Preus, 334); c. 25 (p. 434; Preus, 389). ⁸⁴ Hesshus, De duabus, fol. H1v. ⁸⁵ For the distinction between first-intention concepts and second-intention concepts, see conveniently Christian Knudsen, ‘Intentions and Impositions’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 479–95.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



31

possessor of non-trivial properties. Hesshus is the only theologian I discuss in this book who makes the point in terms of the first intention/second intention distinction. But they all agree with him in relation to Christ’s human nature, since they all accept non-trivial nature-predication in some form or other.

0.4 On What Follows In the remainder of this volume I attempt a brief sketch of some of the key points in the Reformation controversies about the communicatio idiomatum, in a series of snapshots—albeit focusing on what I take to be the most important moments in the discussions.⁸⁶ For reasons of space and overall coherence, I restrict myself to Protestant debates. The responses to Lutheran theologies to have emerged from the Catholic Reformation would nevertheless be well worth exploring in more detail, and on this topic remain astonishingly understudied. In their most capable exponent—Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621)—they by and large repeat what can be found in Reformed sources, in particular Theodore Beza (1516–1605).⁸⁷ Bellarmine has a clear view of the differences between Brenz’s view and that of Chemnitz, for example,⁸⁸ and, indeed, a very acute grasp of the precise metaphysical structure of the former’s view.⁸⁹ But he seems to have borrowed all this from Beza, whom he follows closely. Other debates between Lutherans and Catholics in the 1580s and beyond involve innovations on both sides that are best considered as initiating a whole new stage in the controversies on the metaphysics of the Incarnation—something that I hope to consider in more detail in future work. All of the key debates took place in Continental Europe; there is little distinctive of any note on the topic from the theologians of the Churches in England and Scotland. So I say nothing about these theologians here. Lutheran and Reformed theologians frequently disagreed with each other on the various issues; and while there was considerable unanimity on Christological matters among the Reformed group(s), there was considerable dissent between

⁸⁶ Apart from the obvious dictionary and encyclopedia entries, there is very little literature on the history of the communicatio idiomatum in general. For a brief account that (understandably) confines itself to hypostasis-predication, see Grzegorz Strzelczyk, Communicatio idiomatum: Lo scambio delle proprietà. Storia, status quaestionis e prospettive, Tesi Gregoriana, Serie Theologia, 105 (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2004). ⁸⁷ For a clear if somewhat partisan treatment of Bellarmine’s criticisms of Lutheran theology in general—though one insufficiently sensitive to the deep divergences within the Lutheran tradition (e.g. between Luther and Brenz)—see Christian David Washburn, ‘St Robert Cardinal Bellarmino’s Defense of Catholic Christology Against the Lutheran Doctrine of Ubiquity’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Catholic University of America, 2004. ⁸⁸ See Washburn, ‘St Robert Cardinal Bellarmino’s Defense’, 146. ⁸⁹ See e.g. Washburn, ‘St Robert Cardinal Bellarmino’s Defense’, 130, 138.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

32

 

different Lutheran theologians. So some of my snapshots concern intra-Lutheran debates.⁹⁰ As we shall see, the starting point of all of the discussions was a claim Luther or (probably) Melanchthon first made in 1527, to the effect that Christ’s body is necessarily omnipresent—an assertion universally rejected by Reformed theologians. This view is so startling, and so original, that it is perhaps no wonder Lutherans themselves often understood it in very different ways, and sometimes rejected it. I propose an interpretation of the whole debate surrounding the communicatio idiomatum that is in a number of ways novel. The standard story runs something like this. Luther’s Christology marks a profound break from Medieval theological traditions, and involves both truly innovative insights and the retrieval of Cyrilline and Alexandrian Christology, with a strong emphasis on both the hypostatic union and the deification of the human nature. In this narrative, Luther rejects the predominant Medieval view—namely, the supposital-union theory—and claims, in alleged contradistinction to the adherents of the supposital-union

⁹⁰ There is no recent general treatment of the debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the topic that I am interested in here. There is, however, a massive, minutely detailed, literature on some of the intra-Lutheran debates: see e.g. Johannes Hund, Das Wort ward Fleisch: Eine systematischtheologische Untersuchung zur Debatte um die Wittenberger Christologie und Abendmahlslehre in den Jahren 1567 bis 1574, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, 114 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), on some of the Christological debates leading up to the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577/1580; and Irene Dingel, Concordia controversa: Die öffentlichen Diskussionen um das lutherische Konkordienwerk am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 93 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), on debates after the Formula. See too the literature cited in n. 95 below. Some of the same ground is covered briefly in Ulrich Wiedenroth, Krypsis und Kenosis: Studien zu Thema und Genese der Tübinger Christologie im 17. Jahrhundert, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 162 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 384–405, as background to a treatment of the Christological controversy between the theologians of Tübingen and Giessen in the first quarter of the seventeenth century (a controversy I mention briefly in my concluding comments below). In comparison with these magnificent studies, my ‘snapshot’ approach is designed to allow for closer theological and conceptual analysis at the cost of historical depth and breadth. The best brief account of the Lutheran controversies in English is Charles P. Arand, Robert Kolb, and James A. Nestigen, The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 227–54. A still useful summary of the overall debates behind the Formula, thorough though somewhat opinionated, can be found in F. Bente’s introduction to Concordia triglotta (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 1–256, also published separately as F. Bente, Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1965). The closest work in the literature to what I attempt here, albeit restricted to Lutheranism, is Joar Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics? The Interpretation of Communicatio Idiomatum in Early Modern Lutheranism, REFO500 Academic Studies, 2 (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). Despite the title of his book, Haga focuses more on the specific question of bodily omnipresence and its theological and cosmological consequences in the Lutheran tradition, and less on the more technical aspects of the communicatio idiomatum that are of interest to me. For the most part, Haga does not say enough on the matters I discuss here for me to know whether I would disagree with him, or he with me. In methodology and overall approach, the closest thing in the literature to what I attempt here is Stefan Lindholm, Jerome Zanchi (1516–90) and the Analysis of Reformed Scholastic Christology, Reformed Historical Theology, 37 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). A brilliant discussion that covers much of the ground that I chart, though with a very different narrative, can be found in I. A. Dorner, History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, Division second, vol. 2, trans. D. W. Simon (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1882), 53–362.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



33

theory, that the central Christological locus is the human nature’s coming to participate in the divine attributes (something manifested most clearly in Luther’s claim that Christ’s human nature is omnipresent), and thus that this participation is essential to the hypostatic union, or is what the hypostatic union consists in. (Luther, after all, maintained bodily omnipresence on the grounds that without it the incarnate person would be ‘divided’, as we shall see.) And this participation is usually supposed to be an instance not just of SG-possession in general but of the genus maiestaticum in particular.⁹¹ In sharp contrast to this, it is held, Zwingli’s view is that there is only a verbal or figurative predication of the human attributes of the divine person, so that it is not the case that the divine person (as opposed to his human nature) is truly characterized by human attributes, or the Son of Man (for example) by divine ones. John Calvin (1509–64), it is alleged, corrects this view by allowing real predication, while nevertheless not allowing any kind of SGpossession. The Reformed tradition (Zwingli and Calvin, and their followers) is generally portrayed as following the main lines of Medieval Christology, against Luther’s more Patristically inflected Christology.⁹² Various positive and negative theological appraisals go hand in hand with this narrative—though these evaluations are, of course, dependent on a commentator’s perspective and antecedent theological commitments. Luther’s supposed acceptance of the genus maiestaticum is held by hostile readers to force him in the direction of miaphysitism—accepting just one nature in Christ, comprising the complete set of divine and human properties possessed by the incarnate divine person—or even monophysitism, since the possession of a divine attribute or attributes might be thought to obliterate the human nature. Zwingli’s alleged refusal to predicate human properties literally of the person is held by different hostile readers to push him in the direction of Nestorianism and Antiochene Christology more generally—in effect, accepting two persons in Christ. As we shall see, these appraisals spring from the earliest period of the debates: the charge of Nestorianism was laid against Zwingli by none other than Luther himself; and the Reformed tradition, beginning at least with Calvin, argued that accepting bodily omnipresence entailed miaphysitism or even monophysitism. Almost all of this, the historical and the evaluative alike, is false; or so I shall argue. Luther’s Christology is in most respects quite Medieval. Despite some ⁹¹ Some writers also ascribe to Luther an adherence to the genus tapeinoticum—a kenosis or emptying of the divine properties (following Phil. 2:7: ‘he emptied (ekenōsen) himself, taking the form of a servant’) that allows predicating human attributes of the divine nature: see e.g. Marc Lienhard, Luther: Witness to Jesus Christ: Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982), 339–41. This claim sometimes makes its way into modern Lutheran dogmatics, too. It is patently false as a reading of Luther, as I shall show in Chapter 1. ⁹² These points are standard in the literature. Many of them are made with admirable clarity in the influential textbook by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), 299. Others of them I consider in more detail in their proper places below.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

34

 

surface worries about the terminology, Luther in effect accepts the suppositalunion theory, and many, though not all, Lutherans follow him, across all sides of the Lutheran theological divides.⁹³ Indeed, Luther typically employs the technical apparatus of Scholasticism—particularly a version of Ockhamist semantics—to explicate Christological problems.⁹⁴ Bodily omnipresence as understood by Luther is a natural development of Medieval theories of the body—albeit one that Luther argues for, Christologically, on novel grounds, as I will show—and has nothing to do with the later genus maiestaticum. And whether or not bodily omnipresence is possible was seen by all discussants as a matter of theological anthropology, not of Christology. All parties accept that human attributes are genuinely predicable of the divine person—something that was standard in both Patristic and Scholastic Christology too. But as suggested above there is a crucial disagreement about the ontological relation between human properties and the divine person (though it is one that has not, I think, been noticed in the literature—partly because, at the very beginning of the debate, Luther did not really understand Zwingli’s position). The issue dividing Luther, on the one hand, and the Medieval theologians and Reformed theologians, on the other is whether or not some of the predications expressing the relation between human properties and the divine person are fundamental. Luther, in short, accepts LH-semantics for Christological predications, and Zwingli CN-semantics. But Luther holds that truth tracks fundamentality (such that a predication of the form ‘x is φ’ requires for its truth the truth of ‘x is Φ’). So his misunderstanding of Zwingli consists in his belief that, since Zwingli denies that any such predications are fundamental, he is committed to the falsity of all predications expressing the communicatio. This is a belief that Zwingli’s own way of speaking (in effect in terms of a linguistic trope), unless understood very carefully, can tend to encourage. So one natural Christological fault-line, to do with the genus idiomaticum, lies between those who accept, contra CN-semantics, that the divine person bears his human properties, and those who do not, and thus accept CN-semantics. Equally, many thinkers on both sides accept some form of SG-possession—e.g. that Christ’s flesh is life-giving, one of the key supernatural attributes ascribed to the human nature by Cyril of Alexandria and others. (In fact, only Zwingli and the ⁹³ I take Luther’s acceptance of the supposital union to have been demonstrated by Graham White a quarter of a century ago: see Graham White, Luther as Nominalist: A Study of the Logical Methods used in Martin Luther’s Disputations in the Light of their Medieval Background, Schriften der LutherAgricola-Gesellschaft, 30 (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Society, 1994). But since the evidence is not wholly unambivalent, and since commentators sometimes still ascribe to Luther a rejection of the theory, I shall discuss the issue in some detail in Chapter 1. ⁹⁴ For details of Luther’s deep familiarity with the central metaphysical and semantic claims of nominalism, see White, Luther as Nominalist. Historians have recently begun to take a very nuanced view of Luther’s not wholly negative relation to Scholasticism and to philosophy more generally. See usefully Theodor Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Theologie und Philosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



35

later Melanchthon do not this.) So if we are looking for Christological fault lines, another natural one will be between those who do, and those who do not, accept some form of SG-possession. And this distinction places almost all thinkers— Lutheran and Reformed alike—in the same camp, the inheritors of Medieval theology, and behind that of Cyril and the Alexandrian tradition. But what distinguishes many Lutheran theologians (though not Luther himself) from their Reformed contemporaries is the belief that some of the instances of SG-possession involve the selfsame attributes that characterize God, identical with (e.g.) God’s omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, and somehow shared with the human nature: a belief in the genus maiestaticum, in short. I shall show that this belief originates not in the Christology of Luther but in that of his slightly younger contemporary Brenz. Brenz requires the genus maiestaticum not for the sake of spatial inseparability but in order to secure the truth of the whole range of locutions in which divine attributes are predicated of the Son of Man: not just ‘the Son of Man is omnipresent’, but (e.g.) ‘the Son of Man is omnipotent’, or ‘the Son of Man is omniscient’. His position is thus quite different from Luther’s, and attempts (alas, all too common) to foist on Luther Brenz’s view that the hypostatic union requires the human nature’s participation in divine attributes are pure eisegesis—as I shall attempt to show in what follows.⁹⁵ Indeed, one curious feature that will result from my analysis is that the genus maiestaticum emerged not as the result of any systematic Christological reflection of a sustained kind, but as the almost accidental confluence of two quite distinct trends in Lutheran Christology of the later 1520s: on the one hand, Luther’s belief in the (albeit finite) omnipresence of Christ’s human nature, and the consequent emphasis on the majesty of Christ’s exalted nature (admittedly construed in a traditionally Scholastic way); and on the other, Brenz’s claim (which I examine in Chapter 2) that the correct referent of the term ‘man’ in Christological contexts is not the divine person but the human nature, and that the communicatio idiomatum thus requires not only the communication of human properties to the divine person but also the communication of divine properties to the human nature. There was unanimity among both the Reformed theologians and those Lutherans ⁹⁵ Some of these claims reflect advances in the Lutheran literature first found in Theodor Mahlmann’s pioneering Das neue Dogma der lutherischen Christologie: Problem und Geschichte seiner Begründung (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1969); see too in Jörg Baur, Luther und seine klassischen Erben: Theologische Aufsätze und Forschungen (Tübingen, Mohr, 1993). Both resources are very helpful on the details of intra-Lutheran debates during the period I discuss. In particular, Mahlmann has drawn attention to some of the differences between Luther, Brenz, and Chemnitz, specifically highlighting Chemnitz’s role as a mediator between Brenz’s Christology and Melanchthon’s. But I develop the issues in quite different ways from those found in Mahlmann and Baur, in particular by a careful focus on questions of semantics, and by close attention to the details of the arguments found in the various theologians. Overall, the positions of the theologians just mentioned strike me as far more diverse than Mahlmann and Baur suppose. Mahlmann’s ‘neue Dogma’ is of course bodily omnipresence: the originally derogatory description was coined by Heinrich Bullinger (see Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 9).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

36

 

who did not follow Brenz in rejecting both of these views. Indeed, some of those later theologians who accepted the genus maiestaticum disagreed both with Luther’s way of understanding bodily omnipresence (namely, as a created accident of the human nature) and with Brenz’s asymmetrical view of the communicatio. So among those who accept the genus maiestaticum there is a subordinate dispute about the acceptability or otherwise of CN-semantics for the genus idiomaticum (and, coordinate with this, one on the correct semantics for the genus maiestaticum); and another on the grounding of the genus either in Christological metaphysics (Brenzians), or in Scripture (non-Brenzians). The non-Brenzians were by and large students and younger associates of Melanchthon’s who, unlike Melanchthon himself, believed that there were good reasons, albeit Scriptural rather than metaphysical, for the genus maiestaticum. I read my theologians carefully but not eirenically or ecumenically: my aim is to discern differences, not gloss over them to generate some kind of more or less unified tradition or traditions. And looking for differences, I have found them; many more than previous commentators have remarked on, and most strikingly in the shape of unstated shifts and developments, generally reactive, in the thinking of individual theologians. The narrative that I offer relies on tools of philosophy and rational analysis. As I indicated in the Preface, I treat the texts as offering arguments for the various positions defended, and I read these arguments as contributions that should be taken seriously. And sometimes, for the sake of understanding the various views, I make explicit some presuppositions and assumptions that the participants in the debate did not articulate clearly, and perhaps had not even expressly entertained. But is all of this not just a jeu d’esprit? Did Luther himself not warn us about the inapplicability of philosophy in the realm of theology: that theology is a ‘new language’, incommensurable with the language of philosophy and human reason?⁹⁶ I think not. As we shall see, all sides in the debates offer arguments that test their opponents’ positions for coherence and justification relative to the accepted evidence, and probe these positions to expose their unstated presuppositions. Luther’s new language is a specific theory about theological semantics tangential to the issues I treat here: namely, that the meaning of a term should be isolated on syntactic grounds, dependent on the inferences permitted or not by propositions that include the term. Theological terms license inferences that would not be licensed by the terms in a non-theological context.⁹⁷ This is by no means part of a Lutheran jeremiad, coherent or otherwise, against the kind of conceptually careful approach that I adopt here. Quite the contrary: understanding a theological term, as Luther spells this out, requires a great deal of logical care. And my attempt to ⁹⁶ See for instance Luther, Disp. de sent., arg. IIIa, C version (Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, 73 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2009), XXXIX/2, 10.20). ⁹⁷ On this, see White, Luther as Nominalist, 128–39.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi



37

make explicit some of the assumptions accepted by the contributors to the debates has the aim of rendering intelligible views that are otherwise more or less obscure. One mistake that I try to avoid—one that is, I fear, not unknown in the literature on the subject of this work—is that of projecting later views back into earlier ones (e.g. Brenz’s view back into Luther). I try to ascribe to an author explicitly no more than they say, and contextualize them in debates that preceded them, not ones that succeeded them. This seems to be the soundest historical methodology; it also allows us to detect originality in later views when appropriate, rather than merely assuming that all later insights in, for instance, the Lutheran tradition, must necessarily be found in Luther himself too. Someone might object that this approach—that of disregarding the evidence of the near contemporaries and immediate successors of a given theologian—means ignoring data relevant to determining what that theologian thought. So it does. But this worry should not undermine the evidence of a theologian’s own writings. And sometimes difference in educational background (e.g. Scholastic vs. nonScholastic) means that near contemporaries were not especially well-placed to understand each other. Luther, for example, had a standard Ockhamist education; it is hard to imagine that Brenz did—and if he did, his thinking at any rate offers no evidence of any real understanding of Scholastic Christology.⁹⁸ We shall occasionally see the readings offered by later theologians confirm my proposed interpretations—but I do not let those readings guide my discussions. Reading from the ‘far end’ of the discussions, as it were, the Medieval side, allows us to see that Luther gives a far more Scholastic account of the metaphysics and semantics of the hypostatic union than is generally supposed. The way in which he frames his questions, and the way in which he answers them, is thoroughly Scholastic both in form and content. The belief that a theologian who is creative and radically innovative in many areas must be so in all areas is clearly false, and, as we shall see, it is hard to resist the conclusion that many readings of Luther’s Christology come to the conclusions that they do precisely as the result of an assumption, not guided by the texts, that Luther rejects Scholastic approaches to the issue. In fact, as we shall see, all the theologians I discuss other than Brenz and his followers evidence great continuity with Scholastic theology, as they do with Patristic Christology too. And this latter claim is no surprise, given the obvious continuities between Medieval and Patristic Christology—not in its ⁹⁸ Brenz was educated, in the second decade of the fifteenth century, at the University of Heidelberg, in which both realist and nominalist semantics were taught—the so-called via antiqua and via moderna, respectively. Gerhard Ritter paints a very vivid picture of the state of university education there in the first two decades of that century, describing the slow process of the demise of the via antiqua and its replacement with more typically Renaissance forms of education: see Ritter, Die heidelberger Universität im Mittelalter (1386–1508): Ein Stück deutscher Geschichte (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1936), 483. And furthermore, when Brenz (on rare occasions) quotes Medieval theologians, he quotes those from the (realist) via antiqua (e.g. Aquinas, Bonaventure), not the (nominalist) via moderna (e.g. Ockham, Biel).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

38

 

Western, Augustinian, form, but in its Eastern form, mediated fundamentally through John of Damascus. I allow myself to employ some modern philosophical concepts to help understand and clarify what is going on. In so doing, however, I am careful only to use modern language in cases in which my thinkers did indeed have some grasp of the relevant concepts, and I do everything I can to avoid unnecessary anachronism. For example, I have already talked about the ‘truth conditions’ for a predication, and about the fundamentality or non-fundamentality of a given predication. This language is alien to my thinkers. But the basic thoughts—that we can specify certain conditions that need to be satisfied for a predication to be true, and that some predications are ‘joint-cutting’, in Plato’s memorable metaphor—were perfectly familiar to them. I also make a distinction between various kinds of identity or sameness relation—those that satisfy the criteria for strict identity, and those that do not. Such distinctions were well-known at the time, in the shape of Scotus’s formal/adequate and real identity, although it is fair to say that the thinkers who make most use of such distinctions here do not appeal to Scotus, and were in any case probably not particularly sensitive to the nature of their operative presuppositions (e.g. that there are varieties of identity or sameness relations).⁹⁹ I make the distinctions to try to understand what their positions amount to. As is appropriate in a work that is intended to be paradigm-changing, I shall destroy some shibboleths in the history of theology, or at least attempt to: not for the sake of it, but because close attention to the texts seems to me to demand it.

⁹⁹ On Scotus, see n. 70 above.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

1 Luther and Zwingli

The first Christological dispute in the Reformation took place in the 1520s, between Luther and Zwingli, culminating in the failed discussions at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529.¹ This early debate focused on the Eucharist; Christological matters cropped up merely en passant, as a consequence of this prior disagreement. There are many discussions with a more explicitly Christological focus from later in Luther’s career, in particular two Christological disputations from 1539 and 1540. In what follows, I rely on these and on the earlier material. As we shall see, the later treatments do not depart from Luther’s view in the 1520s, though they add a great deal of detail and some significant clarifications. My presentation of Luther’s Christology differs in marked respects from that which we find in most interpreters.² Methodologically, I have prioritized passages in which Luther offers systematic (and sometimes even comprehensive) statements of his theories regarding the metaphysics and semantics of the hypostatic union. I have used these passages as a guide and control when reading texts in which Luther puts some of these theories into practice, even though at times the practice has to act in turn as a specification of the theory. The reason for this is that Luther’s practice does not always conform to his theory, and is thus, it seems to me, liable to mislead the commentator. And Luther’s tendency to exaggeration and rhetorical excess can sometimes tend to obscure his positions. Let me take one example, relevant to my Christological discussion, from the 1520 De captivitate ¹ The definitive treatment of this dispute remains Walther Köhler, Zwingli und Luther: Ihr Streit über das Abendmahl nach seinen politischen und religiösen Beziehungen, 2 vols, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 6–7 (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1924–53; reprinted 2017). For the text of the Marburg Colloquy and its articles, see WA, XXX/3, 110–71b, and XXX/3, Revisionsnachtrag, 22–42; ET in Luther, Works, 55 vols (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–86), XXXVIII, 15–89. ² On Luther’s Christology, the most dependable sources are White, Luther as Nominalist, and David J. Luy, Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014). Many recent treatments still follow the classic but flawed article by Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch’, and for this reason cannot be relied on. On the late Christological disputations, see Axel Schmidt, Die Christologie in Martin Luthers späten Disputationen (St Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1990), and Stefan Streiff,‘Novis linguis loqui’: Martin Luthers Disputation über Joh 1,14 ‘verbum caro factum est’ aus dem Jahr 1539, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, 70 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), both of which have been superseded by White’s account. Perhaps the most thorough treatment of Luther’s overall Christology is Lienhard, Luther, though this too needs to be treated with care, at least in relation to the more technical issues which are the subject of my discussion. On the communicatio idiomatum in Luther, see recently, though with caution, the essays in Bayer Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura; and Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 82–7.

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

40

 

Babylonicae ecclesiae. In his anxiety to distance himself from certain Scholastic doctrines—in particular transubstantiation, the belief that in the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine are converted into Christ’s body and blood— Luther seems at first sight to reject the nominalist two-name theory of predication, according to which a necessary condition for the truth of a predication is that subject and predicate supposit for the same thing.³ As we shall see, this is not in fact his considered view. What he objects to, as I shall show, is the argument from the two-name theory to transubstantiation. As he makes abundantly clear, he believes that the two-name theory, correctly applied to the theological case, supports rather than undermines both his own Eucharistic theology and his Christology. I will take pains to show this and similar points, because there is a great deal of misunderstanding in the literature, perhaps originating in part from a desire, fostered by Luther himself, to make of him less of a Scholastic in certain domains than he actually was. It would, of course, be possible to prioritize his occasional practice over his considered theory, and use that as a guide to what he ‘really’ thought. But to do that would be to take him less seriously than we ought.

1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 1.1.1 Luther 1.1.1.1 The Metaphysics of the Supposital Union Luther explicitly accepts the supposital-union theory, but he does so only with more or less strongly expressed reservations about the terminology of sustaining.⁴ As we have seen, according to the supposital-union theory as usually expressed, there is a sense in which the divine person sustains a human nature, and that this relation can be modelled on the way a substance bears an accident. In the published theses for the 1540 disputation, after stating a thesis reporting the Scholastic view that the human nature is ‘sustained or supposited (sustentari seu suppositari) by the . . . divine suppositum’,⁵ Luther immediately comments, ‘This is said awkwardly (portentose), and nearly constrains God as it were to carry

³ See Luther, De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae, WA, VI, 510.21–511.12; LW, XXXVI, 33–4. ⁴ In making this claim, I am going against the classic interpretation of Luther proposed in Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch’. So the view is not uncontroversial. But I shall present my evidence, and let you, my reader, decide. ⁵ Luther, Disp. de div., thesis 47 (WA, XXXIX/2, 95.34–5). For all quotations from the A version of Disp. de div. I use the English translation by Christopher B. Brown http://www.iclnet.org/pub/ resources/text/wittenberg/luther/luther-divinity.txt, with occasional modifications. There is a translation by Mitchell Tolpingrud, ‘Luther’s Disputation Concerning the Divinity and Humanity of Christ’, Lutheran Quarterly, 10 (1996), 151–78. The version reads smoothly, but unfortunately Tolpingrud mistranslates crucial passages related to the supposital union, shifting the reference of various clauses by adding relative pronouns, and altering the overall meanings of whole sentences by relocating contrastive ‘but’s.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

41

(portare) or wear (gestare) the humanity.’⁶ This objection is only to the way of talking (‘is said awkwardly’), not to the doctrine itself: ‘All these [viz. the Scholastic theologians] understand in a correct and catholic sense, and therefore the inappropriate language should be abandoned by them (condonanda est illis incommoda locutio).’⁷ The theory—that the divine person bears a human nature in a way analogous to that in which a substance bears an intrinsic accident—is true but the expression inapt. We might wonder what it is in the terminology that Luther is concerned about. Wearing, as Luther knew well, is one of the relational or extrinsic Aristotelian accidental categories (relation, place, time, position (i.e. posture), vesture (i.e. wearing; habitus), action, passion), contrasted with the non-relational or intrinsic accidental categories of quantity and quality.⁸ At the heart of Luther’s concern, then, is that the language of sustaining suggests a merely extrinsic relation between the human nature and the person—contrary to the requirements of the supposital-union theory, which builds on the analogy of an intrinsic accident: thus, in the example persistently employed by both Luther and Ockham, which I discuss below, a substance’s having a quality (whiteness), and thus being white. So Luther has no concerns about the analogy to bearing whiteness; what he objects to is the analogy to wearing clothing—which, he worries, is suggested by the language of sustaining. In line with this, Graham White has plausibly argued that what Luther is objecting to is the fact that the language of ‘carrying’ or ‘wearing’ sounds too much like the Christological habitus theory reported by Peter Lombard (1100–60), according to which the divine person was indeed merely ‘clothed’ with his human nature.⁹ This theory (as was of course known to Luther) was widely rejected by the Schoolmen as Nestorian, positing a merely extrinsic union between the divine person and the human nature.¹⁰ In short, Luther objects to this way of talking only on pragmatic grounds, not semantic ones, and the worry is about a potential misunderstanding, not an actual one. The theory is true, even if the standard way of expressing it may mislead. So hesitation about the language of sustaining does not itself mean that Luther rejects the basic metaphysical structure of the supposital-union theory: that is to say, that the human nature is something like a (complex) contingent property of ⁶ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 48 (WA, XXXIX/2, 95.36–7), my translation; I borrow ‘awkwardly’ from Tolpingrud’s ‘this is an awkward way to speak’ (see ‘Luther’s Disputation’, 155). ⁷ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 49 (WA, XXXIX/2, 96.1–2), my translation. ‘Condonanda’ is a gerundive that can mean ‘to be abandoned or ‘to be forgiven’. On the latter interpretation, the Scholastics should be forgiven for their inappropriate language. It is impossible to tell simply from the Latin which meaning Luther intends; the context seems to me to favour the former. ⁸ See Aristotle, Cat., c. 4 (1b25–7). ⁹ See Lombard, Sent. III, d. 6, cc. 4–6 (2 vols, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, 4 (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1971–81), II, 55–9). For the analysis, see White, Luther as Nominalist, 290–1. ¹⁰ See e.g. Aquinas, ST III, q. 2, a. 6 c.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

42

 

the divine person. And this is indeed what he thinks. In the same disputation as that which I have just been discussing, an objector reasons as follows: ‘There is nothing accidental in God. To assume humanity is an accident. Therefore Christ is not God.’ Luther replies: In philosophy this is true; but in theology we have our own rules. When we portray the union so that the divinity in Christ is as it were a substance, but his humanity as it were an accidental quality, like whiteness or blackness, this is not said properly or aptly, but we speak thus so that it can be understood in some way. But the unity of the two natures in one person is the greatest possible, so that they are equally predicated, and communicate their properties to the person, as if he were solely God or solely man.¹¹

Here what worries Luther about the substance–accident model is that it might mislead us into thinking that the union between the person and his human nature was in fact some kind of accidental union, and thus not the ‘greatest possible’.¹² But the model still counts as one for understanding the metaphysical structure of the union. In both cases (Christology; accidental union) there is what I have been characterizing as a bearing-relation. And Luther elsewhere in the disputation states that the human nature ‘inheres’ in the divine person analogously to the way in which an accident inheres in a subject.¹³ The divine and human natures are ‘equally predicated’ because both are natural-kind essences, not accidents, albeit related to the person in different ways (identity vs. bearing). (I comment on the last claim in the passage in a moment.)

1.1.1.2 The Hypostatic Union: Semantic Issues So much for the metaphysics of the hypostatic union. Luther’s view of the semantics of predications in natural matter—the main focus of the relevant discussions—provides additional strong evidence that he accepts the suppositalunion theory, with or without the language of sustaining. I deal in turn with two semantic issues: the questions of the signification and supposition of the relevant terms. (On signification and supposition, see section 0.3, pp. 28–9 above.) On the first of these, signification, Luther draws a distinction between the signification of the term ‘man’ in Christological and non-Christological contexts—a distinction closely related to one made by Ockham, as we shall see. As Luther puts it in the 1539 disputation, using the Medieval terminology rejected a year later, ‘I take “man” in two ways: in one way for a per se subsisting corporeal

¹¹ Luther, Disp. de div., arg. XVII (WA, XXXIX/2, 111.3–15). ¹² The claim that the union was the ‘greatest’ union derives from Bernard of Clairvaux: the union is such because ‘in Christ the Word, soul, and flesh . . . are one person’ (De consideratione V, cc. 8–9 (in Bernard, Opera, ed. J. Leclerq and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77), III, 483)). ¹³ See Luther, Disp. de div., arg. XIIa, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 108.24–109.2).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

43

substance, and in another for a divine person sustaining a humanity.’¹⁴ In the first case, the signification of ‘man’ is identical to the signification of ‘humanity’, in line with standard nominalist semantics. As Luther points out elsewhere, ‘We call terminists a sect of the High Schools, to which I too have belonged. . . . Terminists say . . . that the term “man (homo)” or “humanity (menschheit)” signifies (heist) all men together just like a painted picture indicates (deutet) all men.’¹⁵ (‘Terminist’ here is simply another label for nominalist.) In standard contexts both concrete and abstract substance-sortals signify any and all members of the relevant kind. Elsewhere in the disputation, Luther goes into more detail on the signification of ‘man’, again in ways that draw on the Scholastic terminology: They [viz. the Scholastic theologians] distinguished the ‘men’, and it [viz. ‘man’] signifies something equivocal, such that, when it signifies someone of the human race outside the Incarnation, it signifies a man subsisting per se. This is the philosophical signification. The other is when it is said of Christ. . . . Here it is made to be a new word, signifying the divine person, sustaining (sustentantem) our human [nature], as ‘white’ signifies a human being sustaining whiteness.¹⁶

Again, the idea is that ‘man’ has two significations, one non-theological and one theological. In non-theological contexts, ‘man’ signifies a human being, a person (that is to say, an individual human nature independent of the Word), and, more generally, concrete natural-kind and accident-kind nouns signify supposita; in ¹⁴ Luther, Disp. de sent., arg. 9, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 17.4–6). There is a translation of the A version of this text in LW, XXXVIII, 235–77. But in its rendition of matters philosophical it is highly unreliable, and I use my own translation of the texts here. ¹⁵ Luther, Tischrede, no. 6419 (Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden, 6 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1912–21), V, 653.1–2, 7–10). ¹⁶ Luther, Disp. de sent., arg. IIIa, C version (WA, XXXIX/2, 10.26–32). See too the B version, where the following view is ascribed to the ‘Scholastics’: ‘Man is equivocal, 1. it is said of the created human genus, 2. it signifies God sustaining a human creature’ (WA, XXXIX/2, 9–10). But the lengthier and more technical C version makes clear that Luther objects not to the thought that one possible signification of ‘man’ is ‘God’, but to the thought that the signification of ‘man’ is equivocal. Luther’s own view is not that ‘man’ in the philosophical and theological contexts is equivocal, but that it is simply two different word-types in the different contexts—‘it is made to be a new word’, as in the passage just quoted. This view, unique to Luther as far as I know, has no specifically Christological consequences: Luther adopts it because, as he sees it, the theological use of the language of philosophy would somehow derogate from the dignity of God and theology. The unadorned language of philosophy would permit unorthodox implications, so claiming that there are two different word-types (‘man’ and ‘man’) with different senses therefore allows Luther to block certain otherwise damaging inferences. For example (to choose the very first argument in the 1540 disputation), ‘A human person is one thing, a divine person another. But in Christ there are both divinity and humanity. Therefore there are two persons in Christ’ (Luther, Disp. de div., arg. 1, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 100.9–11)). Luther responds by denying that the inference is sound. In theology, ‘humanity’ and ‘divinity’ do not signify person but nature, and in the proposed syllogism this semantic shift entails a logical difference (Luther, Disp. de div., arg. 1, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 100.12–16); for the only reliable discussion of this, see White, Luther as Nominalist, 333, 344–7). Of course, asserting equivocation—that (e.g.) ‘man’ is equivocal over theological and non-theological contexts, as for Ockham (on which, see below)—is also sufficient to block the inference. Hence, as I have claimed, the specific theory of meaning Luther adopts in this case makes no substantive difference to his Christology relative to Ockham’s.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

44

 

Christological contexts—in which Christ’s human nature is not independent of the Word, and thus there is no independent person—‘man’ signifies ‘the divine person, sustaining our human nature’. Again, Luther here accepts the pertinence of the analogy between Christ’s human nature and an accident. The text draws out some semantic implications of the view that the human nature is something like a contingent property of the divine person on the assumption that nominalism is true.¹⁷ As we see here, the Christological case exactly parallels the accident case, something I return to in a moment. Luther distinguishes the standard case from the Christological one, in which ‘man’ signifies ‘a divine person sustaining a humanity’. An objector in the 1540 disputation reasons as follows, using the philosophical signification of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’: ‘ “Man” and “humanity” signify the same thing. Therefore it is rightly said, “Christ is humanity.” ’¹⁸ Luther responds by denying the premise in the Christological context: This [viz. the premise] is not conceded; rather, this is: ‘Christ is man’, because this [viz. ‘man’] is a concrete term signifying personally, whereas an abstract term signifies the mode of nature, or naturally, so that therefore it is false that Christ is human nature, that is, humanity, or that Christ is humanity. Aristotle says: abstract terms denote (sonant) nature, concrete terms person.¹⁹

‘Signifying personally’ means signifying the person (in a given nature); ‘signifying naturally’ means signifying the (abstract) nature. So the significations of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’ come apart in the Christological context—‘even though “man” and “humanity” are otherwise synonyms’, as Luther states in thesis 7 of the 1540 disputation.²⁰ In Christology, ‘man’ signifies a person, ‘humanity’ a nature. So in ‘Christ is man’, the predication under discussion in the last displayed quotation, subject and predicate signify the same thing—that is, the person.²¹ I said above that Luther’s view is very close to that of Ockham. The two thinkers agree that in the non-Christological case ‘man’ and ‘humanity’ have the same signification. But we should note that they differ slightly on what that signification is. For Luther, ‘humanity’ signifies (a) human nature, and ‘man’ signifies a ‘man subsisting per se’, as we have just seen—namely, (a) person. In non-Christological contexts, as we have seen, natures and persons are identical. For Ockham, contrariwise, both nouns signify the nature: ‘humanity’ does so without connoting the presence or absence of any relation of being sustained by the divine person;

¹⁷ For the relevance of nominalism here, see the contrasting case discussed in n. 28 below. ¹⁸ Luther, Disp. de div., arg. XII (WA, XXXIX/2, 108.11–12). ¹⁹ Luther, Disp. de div., arg. XII (WA, XXXIX/2, 108.12–17, translation slightly altered). ²⁰ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 7 (WA, XXXIX/2, 93.15). ²¹ Note that the question of the Christologically abstract character of linguistically concrete nouns signifying the parts of a nature, discussed in section 0.3 of the Introduction, had not yet arisen—just as it did not arise in Scholasticism, as far as I know.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

45

‘man’ does so with the relevant connotation (being sustained or not).²² Both terms—‘man’, ‘humanity’—signify particular natures. But their connotations— the extrinsic descriptions under which the object is signified by the term—are different: ‘man’ connotes the fact that natures are related in various ways to supposita, ‘humanity’ does not. In non-Christological contexts a particular nature is its own subject—hence in standard cases, as for Luther, concrete and abstract coincide, and indeed their significates are identical with the relevant suppositum. What Ockham has here, and Luther lacks, is the theory of connotation. This makes a small but noticeable difference to their accounts of the signification of the relevant terms, since connotation allows Ockham to explain the supposition of the concrete terms in a way that is not open to Luther—albeit that the two thinkers are in agreement on the question of what it is that concrete nouns supposit for in standard subject-predicate sentences. Thus, in order to secure the correct supposition of the various terms in Christological and non-Christological locutions Luther needs ‘man’ in both cases to signify the person. Ockham can secure the supposition by appealing to the connotation of ‘man’: ‘man’ in Christological contexts signifies the nature and connotes its being sustained by another, hence ‘man’ in such locutions can supposit for the person. It is supposition that is important for our purposes, of course, because we want to know what it is that makes the various locutions true, and to do this we need to know what the supposition of the relevant terms is. What we discover is that, for both Ockham and Luther, ‘man’ in Christological contexts supposits for the divine person, and never (properly) for the human nature; and ‘humanity’, conversely, for the human nature, and never (properly) for the divine person. The material on signification just discussed has an effect on the discussion of supposition, since supposition is obviously restricted by signification. Generally, claims to the effect that concrete nouns signify supposita or persons mean that such nouns in standard contexts supposit for supposita too. For example, at the ellipsis in the passage quoted on p. 43, Luther says that ‘man’ in Christological locutions ‘does not supposit for (supponit) that unreal ( fictam) philosophical person’²³—that is to say, it does not supposit for a per se subsisting humanity, a person distinct from the divine person, as it does in standard non-Christological locutions. Rather, the unstated but evident implication is, it supposits for the divine person, just as for Ockham. Luther makes the same point elsewhere. In the list of theses to the 1540 disputation, he confronts a series of what he understands to be deviant Christological locutions, from Scripture and tradition, in which ‘man’ is seemingly used improperly to supposit for the human nature, and attempts to show how they ²² See Ockham, Sum. log. I, c. 7, ll. 70–3, 75–6 (Opera philosophica, ed. I. Lalor and others, 7 vols (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1974–88) I, 25); for discussion, see Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham, 2 vols, Publications in Medieval Studies, 26 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), II, 988. ²³ Luther, Disp. de sent., arg. IIIa, C version (WA, XXXIX/2, 10.29–30).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

46

 

should be understood. The first is from the hymn Te deum: ‘You [viz. the Son of God] took up (a) man (suscepturus hominem) for the purpose of redemption.’²⁴ Luther offers a corrective: ‘The normal way of speaking (as it seems) would be: “When you took up humanity, or human nature, for the purpose of redemption”.’²⁵ ‘Man’ supposits for person, ‘humanity’ for nature, and the person did not take up himself. Luther says the same about Jn 1:14: ‘John 1 says, “the Word was made flesh”, when in our judgement it would have been better said, “The Word was incarnate”, or “made fleshly”.’²⁶ The point of the modification is that ‘flesh’ (by synecdoche) supposits for the human nature, and Luther denies that the Word was made to be the human nature; ‘the Word was incarnate’ or ‘the Word was made fleshly’ signifies that the Word began to be not humanity but man. As Luther puts it, ‘Many things are allowed . . . to the Fathers who are agreed to be orthodox, which we should not imitate.’²⁷ Luther, then, is committed to a very clear distinction between concrete and abstract in Christological contexts, such that concrete terms supposit for the person and abstract terms for the nature. The semantic structure here requires that the human nature is distinct from the divine person. And as I shall show below, the semantic analysis tracks exactly that which Luther accepts for the case of accidental unities. In a passage I quoted on p. 44, Luther notes that the signification of both subject and predicate terms in ‘Christ is a man’ is the person (each is a ‘concrete term signifying personally’, and ‘concrete terms [denote] person’—a point that Luther makes explicitly for ‘man’, but that is obvious for ‘Christ’ too, since it is a proper name). This means that, for the predication ‘Christ is man’ to be true, both terms must supposit for the person. We can see this if we consider the only available Medieval alternative, the theory of predication known as ‘formal’ predication. This theory requires that the predicate term signify a common nature or universal, and nominalists such as Luther have no such things in their ontology. For Luther, both subject and predicate signify—and hence supposit for—supposita or persons.²⁸ Putting it the other way round, it is hard to see how someone might accept that these terms signify persons (as opposed to natures) and yet fail to supposit for persons in standard sentential contexts. And all this in turn means that Luther accepts the so-called ‘two-name’ theory of predication associated with Ockham and nominalist semantics more generally, according to which the truth of a predication requires that subject and predicate supposit for the same thing.²⁹

²⁴ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 11 (WA, XXXIX/2, 93.20, my translation). ²⁵ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 12 (WA, XXXIX/2, 94.1–2, my translation). ²⁶ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 14 (WA, XXXIX/2, 94.5–6). ²⁷ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 16 (WA, XXXIX/2, 94.9–10). ²⁸ Aquinas’s view, for example, is that supposition is a property only of the subject term in a predication, and that truth requires that the item supposited for by the subject term is an instance of the (common) form or essence signified by the predicate term. (On this, see section 0.3, p. 29, above.) ²⁹ For the two-name theory, see Ockham, Sum. log. II, c. 2, ll. 15–16 (OPh, I, 250).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

47

For Luther, as for Ockham, ‘man’ in these Christological locutions supposits for the divine person.³⁰ It is necessary to understand these claims about the supposition of the various terms in Christological locutions if we are to interpret aright a very complex text dating from 1541, in which Luther offers an admittedly less straightforward treatment of similar semantic issues. I noted above Luther’s recommendation that the language of ‘sustaining’ should be abandoned, even while yet retaining the nominalists’ ‘correct and catholic’ understanding—namely, the supposital-union theory. We see him put this procedure into practice in a table-talk discussion had on 10 or 11 June 1541. In the discussion, Luther objects to certain theologians who hold that ‘ “this man is God” ’ is false, and should be replaced by ‘ “the Son of God, sustaining a human nature, is God” ’;³¹ and that ‘ “this child of Mary is the creator of the world” ’ is likewise false, and should be replaced by ‘ “the Son of God, sustaining a human nature, . . . is the creator of the world” ’.³² Luther presents the opponents’ mistake as follows: They do not let locutions such as ‘God and man are one thing’, or ‘the Son of Mary and the creator are one thing’, remain (bleiben) . . . but say instead (sondern) . . . ‘man is God, that is, the Son of God, sustaining a human nature, is God’, because it is necessary for the subject and predicate to supposit for the same thing.³³

As Luther sees it, construing the semantics in the way objected to here will in effect amount to an assertion of Eutychianism ((here) = Docetism, denying that Christ has a human nature): presumably on the grounds that the opponents hold that ‘this man is God’ and ‘this child of Mary is the creator of the world’ are simply false.³⁴ This passage, indeed, is a key part of Schwarz’s evidence against Luther’s acceptance of the supposital-union theory, understanding the supposital-union theory somehow to generate the wrong truth-values for these non-trivial Christological predications.³⁵ But appearances can be deceptive, as a careful reading of the text shows. To understand what is going on, we need to keep in mind something that I have just shown, namely, that Luther accepts the two-name theory of predication— an acceptance he shares with his (unnamed) Christological opponents. In the discussion, Luther says that his opponents’ view ‘is grounded . . . in false and misunderstood philosophy (in der falschen unverstandenen philosophia)’,³⁶ and

³⁰ For Ockham, see Sum. log. I, c. 7, ll. 61–5 (OPh, I, 25). ³¹ Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 55–6 (Briefwechsel: kritische Gesamtausgabe, 18 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1930–2002), IX, 444). ³² Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 52–3, 58–9 (WA Br., IX, 444–5). ³³ Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 53–5 (WA Br., IX, 444). ³⁴ See Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 60–6 (WA Br., IX, 445). ³⁵ See Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch’, 339–42. ³⁶ Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, l. 34 (WA Br., IX, 444).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

48

 

immediately describes the two-name theory of predication.³⁷ The natural reading of this is that it is the two-name theory of predication that is false. But the subsequent discussion shows that this interpretation is not correct: the argument assumes the truth of this theory, and the false theory is one that misunderstands the two-name theory of predication as Luther applies it in this context. In the displayed passage just quoted, Luther analyses ‘man is God’ as ‘man and God are one thing’. This conforms almost exactly to the analysis of the same Christological locution that Luther offered a few years earlier in the 1528 Eucharistic treatise Vom Abendmahl Christi: Bekenntnis. Here Luther understands the analysis to show that ‘man is God’ is an instance of what was known to the Scholastics as ‘identical predication (praedicatio identica)’.³⁸ So before I consider Luther’s own understanding of the Christological predications under discussion, it is worth briefly sketching some pertinent background for the notion of identical predication. The term ‘identical predication’ gets used in a number of ways in theology from the thirteenth century onwards, in both theoretical and non-theoretical contexts. We find it first in Bonaventure (c. 1217–74), who in Trinitarian contexts distinguishes predication ‘by inherence’ from predication ‘by identity’.³⁹ Scotus draws on this to make a general distinction between ‘formal’ predication and predication ‘by identity’. Formal predication obtains in cases in which the predicate signifies a nature had by the subject, on the assumption, accepted by Scotus, that there are in some sense common natures;⁴⁰ predication by identity obtains in cases in which the predicate ‘is taken for the suppositum’⁴¹—it obtains, in other words, in which the predication is an instance of the two-name theory. Paul of Venice (1369–1429), the great encyclopedist of Scotistic logic, follows Scotus in this context, using the phrase simply to pick out two-name predication as opposed to formal predication.⁴² In more theoretical mode, identical predication (in at least one common iteration) is a variety of two-name predication, adopted by nominalists, for predications that do not fall under the scope of Porphyry’s predicables. The reason

³⁷ Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 35–42 (WA Br, IX, 444). ³⁸ See Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 439.1, 440.34–441.12; LW, XXXVII, 295, 297–8, On identical predication in Lutheran Scholasticism, see Simo Knuuttila, ‘Philosophy and Theology in Seventeenth-Century Lutheranism’, in Simo Knuuttila and Risto Saarinen (eds.), Theology and Philosophy in Early Modern Philosophy (1550–1750), Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Series Humaniora, 360 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2010), 41–54. Among historians, Dorner correctly notices that Luther accepts the applicability of identical predication in these contexts: see his History, 130–2. ³⁹ See Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum I, d. 5, q. 1, a. 1 c (in Bonaventure, Opera omnia, 10 vols (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902), I, 113b). ⁴⁰ See Scotus, Ord. III, d. 7, q. 1, nn. 9–10 (Vatican ed., IX, 264–5). ⁴¹ Scotus, Ord. III, d. 7, q. 1, n. 13 (Vatican, IX, 265). ⁴² See Simo Knuuttila, ‘Supposition and Predication in Medieval Trinitarian Logic’, Vivarium, 51 (2013), 260–74 (pp. 262–3).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

49

that the relevant predications do not fall under the scope of the predicables is that the sameness involved, picked out by the copula ‘is’, falls short of the absolute identity required for standard nominalist two-name predications—something that arises typically in Trinitarian cases.⁴³ The basic strategy is to test Trinitarian predications for truth in terms of an analysis that adds ‘everything which is’ to the beginning of the target predication. Contrast, for example, ‘the Father is the divine essence’ and ‘the divine essence is the Father’. According to the analysis, the first— the identical predication ‘everything which is the Father is the divine essence’—is true, since there is nothing that is the Father that is not the divine essence. But the second—‘everything which is the divine essence is the Father’—is false, since there some things that are the divine essence that are not the Father: for example, the Son. The analysis shows how various Trinitarian paralogisms can be blocked: for example, ‘the divine essence is the Father; the Son is the divine essence; therefore the Father is the Son’. Here the analysis shows the first premise is simply false. (This figure one syllogism is of course not the only possible paralogism, and different strategies were used for the different figures; but this is enough to give an idea of what is going on.) As this brief history makes clear, there is no univocal sense of ‘identical predication’, and Luther does not tell us what his theory is. We have to infer it by looking at his practice. In common with the Trinitarian uses just mentioned, Luther appeals to identical prediction in contexts in which the aim is to test for truth predications of a theological kind which do not fall under the scope of Porphyry’s predicables: namely, predications in the domains of Christology (‘man is God’), the Eucharist (‘bread is body), and the Trinity (‘God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’).⁴⁴ In the 1528 text, Luther’s Christological analysis of identical prediction—predications such as ‘This man is God’s Son’⁴⁵—is that ‘two diverse substances may well be [i.e. are] in reality and in name, one substance’:⁴⁶ for example, that God and man are one substance. In the 1541 text that I am discussing here, Luther argues that ‘this man is God’ is to be analysed as ‘God and man are one thing’. The reason in both cases, presumably, is that ‘this man is God’ (and the like) is ambiguous between two possible interpretations: a Porphyrian one—according to which the predication gives what it is, or part of what it is, to be an instance of the subject term (i.e. genus, species, or specific difference)— and a non-Porphyrian one, making it an instance of identical predication. On the first interpretation, ‘this man is God’ means that what it is to be a man, or part of what it is to be a man, is to be (a) God. As thus construed, the predication ⁴³ See Knuuttila, ‘Supposition’, 271; Olli Hallamaa, ‘Defending Common Rationality: Roger Roseth on Trinitarian Paralogisms’, Vivarium, 41 (2003), 84–119. ⁴⁴ See Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 439.1, 440.34–441.12, 442.25–8; LW, XXXVII, 295, 297–8, 300. ⁴⁵ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 440.35; LW, XXXVII, 297. ⁴⁶ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 439.30–1; LW, XXXVII, 296.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

50

 

is false. Luther makes the point in the 1539 Christological disputation. Among the opening theses we find the following: ‘In theology it is true that the Word was made flesh; in philosophy it is simply impossible and absurd. And this predication, “God is a man” is not less but rather more inconsistent (disparata) than if you were to say, “A human being is a donkey.” ’⁴⁷ Obviously, on this philosophical or Porphyrian interpretation, the sentence ‘this man is God’ is false. On the second interpretation however, according to which God and man are one thing, the sentence ‘this man is God’ is held by Luther to be true, an instance of a non-Porphyrian or identical predication. What might we say about the supposition of ‘God’ and ‘man’ in the predication ‘this man is God’, and in its analysis ‘God and man are one thing’? As I have shown, in the Christological disputations of 1539 and 1540 Luther is clear that in the first of these they both supposit for the same thing: the divine person. The sentence to be analysed, then, is simply an instance of the two-name theory of predication. (I assume that there is no reason to suppose that Luther’s views in 1528 and 1541 conform with each other but not with what he thought in 1539 and 1540.) Presumably, then, the terms have just this supposition in the analysis too. Luther cannot be claiming that one of the two substances that ‘are one thing’ is the humanity, since nothing in Luther’s discussion suggests that ‘man’ could ever supposit properly for the humanity (as we might find in the Brenzian accounts that I describe in Chapters 2 and 4). As we have seen, Luther takes its supposition in Christological locutions to be the divine person, and deliberately rephrases locutions in which it seems to supposit for the humanity by substituting the term ‘humanity’. Equally, he vigorously resists claims to the effect that the divine person might become humanity, or the humanity the divine person. (I will provide ample further evidence of this below.) The talk of ‘two substances’ in Vom Abendmahl is a little misleading, but no more so than talking of absolute identity as a relation between two things, as is commonly done in all but the most logically fastidious circles. Here, the substances are diverse simply because the natures are different kinds. So Luther takes from the Scotists the thought that identical predication is a kind of two-name predication, and from the nominalists the thought that this kind of analysis of two-name predications is the one applicable in non-Porphyrian contexts. But the ‘are one thing’ analysis as such seems to be peculiar to Luther. And unlike the theorized version of identical predication that I discussed in above, there is no requirement in Luther’s account that the sameness relation here is anything other than absolute identity.⁴⁸

⁴⁷ Luther, Disp. de sent., theses 2 and 3 (WA, XXXIX/2, 3.3–6). ⁴⁸ Indeed, Luther expressly denies the non-standard theory of identity known to him (i.e. Scotus’s formal distinction): see Luther, De unitate essentiae divinae disputatio, th. 9–12 (WA, XXXIX/2, 253.17–254.6).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

51

We can present Luther’s semantics in terms of an identity relation: LS-semantics:

‘God is man’ =def ‘God and this man are the same thing’.

This is an instance of Luther’s semantics for predication ‘in natural matter’; obviously, it can be generalized to cover proper names and other relevant natural-kind terms. (Unlike the other semantic principles I spell out in the book, the definition here does not represent the truth conditions for the definiendum. I take it that the truth conditions for ‘God and this man are the same thing’ are that God bears a human nature.) Luther’s view, then, turns out to be perfectly clear. The opponents’ is rather murkier. It seems to have two components. First, the opponents use the prohibited language of sustaining, but apparently understand it in the way that Luther warned against in the 1540 disputation. So they reject Luther’s analysis of ‘this man is God’ in terms of identical predication—they deny LS-semantics—since they deny the claim that ‘this man’ and ‘God’, in ‘this man is God’, supposit for the same thing: thus, as Luther puts it, they deny that ‘God and man are one thing’. The terms that, on their analysis, supposit for the same thing are merely ‘the Son of God’ and ‘God’. So the locution ‘the Son of God, sustaining a human nature, is God’ replaces ‘man is God’ (the opponents assert the former ‘instead’ of the latter) since in the former but not the latter (according to the opponents) subject and predicate supposit for the same thing: thus, the opponents adopt the former locution ‘because it is necessary for the subject and predicate to supposit for the same thing’—something that is according to them not secured in the latter. Secondly, as already noted, the opponents deny LS-semantics because they deny that ‘this man’ can supposit for the divine person. But why should they deny this? Presumably because they hold that ‘man’ signifies merely a concrete human nature. As Luther and they agree, such a thing cannot be God, and ‘man’ thus understood cannot supposit for the divine person. So Luther is objecting merely to the opponents’ view that—on the grounds that ‘this man’ does not supposit for the Son of God—‘this man is God’ is false. As have seen, Luther himself is explicit that ‘man’ in Christological locutions supposits for the Son of God, and thus has no difficulty analogous to that of the opponents. In the 1540 disputation Luther was worried about a potential misunderstanding, not an actual one. No one accepting the language of sustaining in fact understood the hypostatic union in the way that Luther worries about in the disputation. I suspect that the Christological opponents in the 1541 discussion are likewise straw men, set up to show the theologically and semantically absurd consequences of denying a completely different Lutheran doctrine. Luther’s real interest in the whole discussion is Eucharistic.⁴⁹ He holds the view—a version of ⁴⁹ This context is made plain at the very beginning of the discussion: see Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 2–4 (WA Br., IX, 434).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

52

 

what is sometimes labelled ‘consubstantiation’—that ‘this [bread]’ in ‘this [bread] is Christ’s body’ supposits for the same thing as ‘Christ’s body’, and thus that the locution is true given the two-name theory of predication. In this context, bread and Christ’s body are one and the same, parallel to LS-semantics: both bread and body. Luther’s opponents, here identified as ‘Thomists’, instead accept transubstantiation— that the Eucharistic bread simply ceases to exist—on the grounds that it is impossible for subject and predicate in ‘this [bread] is Christ’s body’ to signify the same thing, and thus to supposit for the same thing.⁵⁰ In the parallel discussion in Vom Abendmahl, Luther describes his Catholic opponents as rejecting the view that ‘this bread’ and ‘Christ’s body’ could be the same thing.⁵¹ The Christological discussion in the Table-Talk shows how an analogous error would work out in a different area, one on which all sides—Luther and his Catholic opponents—agree. The Eucharistic opponents, forgetting the specifically theological application of the two-name theory (that is, forgetting about non-Porphyrian identical predication as construed by Luther), suppose that ‘this’ in ‘this is my body’ must supposit not for bread but merely for Christ’s body, since bread cannot be Christ’s body. But if, the argument runs, the Catholics accept predications of the form ‘this man is God’, they should have no trouble with the formally similar predication ‘this [bread] is Christ’s body’, and thus accept not transubstantiation but consubstantiation. And—the contrapositive—if identical predication cannot secure the literal truth of ‘this [bread] is Christ’s body’, then pari passu it will not be able to secure the literal truth of ‘this man is God’ either—just as in the opponents’ semantic analysis of ‘this man is God’.⁵²

⁵⁰ Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 40–6 (WA Br., IX, 444); for the reference to Thomists, see l. 9 (WA Br., IX, 443). Curiously, Thomists tend not to accept the two-name theory of predication, as we have seen. This does not affect the content of Luther’s discussion, but certainly adds to the impression that the opponents are fictitious. ⁵¹ See Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 439.13–15; WA, XXXVII, 295. ⁵² Luther develops an analogous line of thinking in the 1528 Eucharistic treatise. Here he argues that if the semantics of ‘this [bread] is my body’ require that the bread is no longer existent, then the semantics of ‘this man is the Son of God’ will require that ‘the humanity vanish or be annihilated, in order that the word “this” may refer to God and not to the man’ (Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 440.35–6; LW, XXXVII, 297). The argument is that neglecting identical predication (in Luther’s sense) in the Eucharistic case would, for the sake of consistency, require neglecting it in the Christological one too: again, with dismal Docetic Christological consequences. At one point in Vom Abendmahl, Luther states, in relation to the Eucharist, and apparently contrary to the burden of his discussion in this part of the text, ‘No identical predication is even there; Wyclif and the sophists only dream that it is’ (Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 445.1; LW, XXXVII, 303). The ‘sophists’ deny the presence of the bread, and John Wyclif (1330–84) denies the presence of the body: so what Luther means is that neither of these theories accepts identical predication in Luther’s sense—that is, according to an analysis such that bread and body are one thing. On Luther’s account, both Wyclif and the Schoolmen accept the two-name theory of predication (as Luther does; they label it ‘identical predication’ according to Luther’s report here), but do not accept Luther’s analysis of the Eucharistic case in terms of his own understanding of identical predication.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

53

Affirming transubstantiation has the unexpected consequence that ‘this man is God’ is false: something that the real opponents—the ‘Thomists’—would decidedly not want to affirm.⁵³ So the rejected view is probably offered purely for dialectical purposes, and the view is simply a hypothetical example of the dire knock-on theological consequences of accepting transubstantiation, given the two-name theory of predication accepted on all sides. Luther is not interested in rejecting the supposital-union theory. Rather, he is making a point about the absurd Christological semantics that would follow if Christological locutions followed the logic of transubstantiation rather than consubstantiation. If one substance cannot be another (which is to say that one substance cannot belong to two natural kinds—that bread cannot be body, and God cannot be man), then the only Christological option is the (unorthodox) habitus theory (here expressed by the language of sustaining), forced on the opponents precisely because they have to deny ‘this man is God’. And Luther’s argument is successful only on the assumption that he himself accepts the two-name theory of predication. The discussion is highly compressed, and the dialectic admittedly complex and liable to mislead unless read with great care and attention to the Medieval background. In the same text, Luther raises a second objection to the ‘Thomists’ too: that someone reasoning in the way just ascribed to the opponents ‘denies that the Son of God is a man in first act (actu primo), but thinks that he sustains a human nature as in second act (actu secundo), which is the most heretical saying (hereticissimum dictum)’,⁵⁴ (and so, incidentally, cannot be intended to state the ‘correct and Catholic’ view of Scotus and Ockham). Here again, the opponents apparently understand the language of sustaining in terms of doing, not being: wearing the humanity as an extrinsic feature or covering (‘sustains’ it ‘in second act’)., And the same worry arises: they cannot on this basis affirm that ‘the Son of God is man’, since there is no easy way to this predication from the one that they accept—namely, ‘the Son of God is clothed in humanity’. The one predication is relational; the other intrinsic. Since on the rejected view the Son of God is not in

⁵³ Should Luther’s opponents find this line of reasoning persuasive? What is lacking, it seems to me, is any account of the relevant unity relation in the Eucharistic case. In the discussion in Vom Abendmahl, Luther notes that the unity relation grounding the predication in the Eucharistic case is neither ‘natural’ (as in the Trinity) nor ‘personal’ (as in the Incarnation) but ‘sacramental’ (Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 442.25–6, 28; LW, XXXVII, 300). What this means is that the metaphysical structures that secure the truth of these different identical predications are very different from each other. Luther does not tell us what the relevant structure is in the Eucharistic case—perhaps he does not have an idea, and in any case seems to suppose that pointing his opponents towards identical predication is sufficient to deal with their worries. As I argue here, he tells us very explicitly what the relevant structure is for the Incarnation case: it is supposital union, just as in Ockham’s account of the same Christological predication-relation. ⁵⁴ Luther, Tischrede, annex to letter no. 3629, ll. 68–70 (WA Br., IX, 445).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

54

 

fact man, the Son of God clothed in humanity has just one nature, the divine: hence Eutychianism.⁵⁵ What is it for a divine person to be ‘a man in first act’? It cannot amount to being in some sense the same as the humanity or human nature (as in Brenz’s view), for the reason already given: construing the locution in this way violates Luther’s position on the correct supposition of ‘man’ in these Christological locutions. So it must amount to the divine person’s bearing a substantial (nonaccidental) human nature in such a way as to ground the genus idiomaticum and predications in natural matter—that is to say, it must amount to the ‘correct and catholic’ theory of the Schoolmen, the supposital union. Nothing in this passage, then, suggests that Luther changed his mind about the supposition of ‘man’ between 1540 and 1541, or that he intended to reject the supposital-union theory, albeit that he clearly wanted to avoid what had become for him the suspect language of sustaining.⁵⁶ If we were to suppose that he meant to change his mind on the substantive metaphysical and semantic questions— even though, as I have argued, nothing in the text just discussed suggests that he did—we would have to explain why he apparently changed it back again in 1544, when he more or less repeats (again) Ockham’s account of the semantics of concrete and abstract nouns in the Christological context (presupposing that ‘man’ supposits for the divine person), and appeals again to the salience of the substance–accident relation for understanding the issue. According to Luther’s understanding of the latter case, When I say ‘whiteness’, I do not actually say (dico) anything white, or the subject [of whiteness]. Rather, ‘whiteness’ separates off (separat) the subject; which “white” then joins and connects up from the subject and what is separated or abstracted [viz. the nature or form, whiteness].⁵⁷

Here, concrete accident-terms signify the substance (along with the accident), and hence supposit for the substance; abstract accident-terms signify, and hence supposit for, the accident itself. The Christological case tracks this exactly, as Luther makes clear in the text that immediately follows the one just quoted: I rightly say, ‘divinity does not suffer’, ‘humanity does not create’. Here I speak of an abstract and separated divinity. But this is not to be done—abstract things ⁵⁵ On this passage, see also White, Luther as Nominalist, 395–6. For a similar worry about the consequences of claiming that that hypostatic union might be a kind of accidental union, see Aquinas, ST III, q. 2, a. 6, in particular the sed contra. Note that Chemnitz provides a rather different analysis of the same text from Luther: see Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 5 (pp. 70–1; Preus, 82). ⁵⁶ It is of course possible that the reports of the disputations are garbled, as Schwarz is forced to suppose in order to maintain his own reading. The accounts are, after all, student reportationes, and no more reliable than any such thing might be. But various reports are more or less consistent about the supposital union. And in any case the published theses from the 1540 disputation seem to me to be clear on the matter. ⁵⁷ Luther, En. 53. cap. Es., WA, XL/3, 707.19–21.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

55

[viz. the natures] must not be separated, otherwise our faith is false. But we should believe ‘this man is God’, in concreto. Here the properties (propria) and attributes (attributa) rightly remain.⁵⁸

Luther begins by accepting the truth of predications such as ‘humanity does not create’ (‘I rightly say . . . ’). Thus, in non-Christological contexts, the predication in abstracto is sufficient for the cognate predication in concreto, since in such contexts the nature is identical to the person (and in such contexts concrete and abstract nouns have the same supposition); indeed, I take, it, predications in abstracto are in these contexts synonymous with the corresponding predications in concreto. But they fail to be so in Christological cases (if they were, ‘our faith would be false’, since Christ’s human nature would, Nestorian-style, be a person). In these cases, abstract nouns supposit for natures, not persons, and what is disallowed is non-trivial Christological predication in abstracto in the absence of the correlative predication in concreto, precisely because these predications fail to be synonymous: the person’s suffering, for example, is not asserted simply by the assertion of the nature’s suffering. In both unions, Christological and accidental, the semantics requires that the person or subject is something united to but distinct from the nature or accident, the first supposited for in the relevant locutions by concrete nouns, and the second by abstract. Again, Ockham’s treatment of the semantics of predications concerning the Incarnation and accidental unities is almost identical to this. We have already seen what Ockham says about the former case. ‘Man’ in these contexts supposits for the divine person, and ‘humanity’ for the human nature. Something analogous goes for accidental predication: ‘This is universally true, “a white thing is white by whiteness” . . . because “white”, when it has personal supposition, always supposits for the subject that sustains the whiteness, which is a suppositum in the genus of substance.’⁵⁹ Personal supposition obtains when the noun supposits for the extramental object that it signifies. So ‘white’ supposits for the substance that sustains the whiteness, and ‘whiteness’ supposits for the accident independently of its relation to its substance. What Luther and Ockham say on these semantic questions is precisely what someone who accepted both the supposital-union theory and the two-name theory of prediction would need to say, with or without Scotus’s language of sustaining. The fact that, for both theologians, concrete and abstract nouns in Christological contexts have distinct suppositions presupposes that Luther denies the possibility that the divine person and the human nature might be, or come to be, the same thing. It is God and man that are the same thing, not God and humanity. It seems to me, then, that Luther’s acceptance of broadly Ockhamist

⁵⁸ Luther, En. 53. cap Es., WA, XL/3, 707.22–6. ⁵⁹ Ockham, Rep. III, q. 1 (OTh, VI, 29.12–17).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

56

 

Christological semantics, and the metaphysics that underlies it, remained settled throughout his career.

1.1.1.3 The Divine Person and Human Properties I claimed in the Introduction that Luther accepts LH-semantics. Since Luther accepts that the divine person bears a human nature in something like the way a substance bears an accident, Luther’s acceptance of the supposital-union theory gives us the first necessary condition for Christ’s bearing Φ-ness in LH-semantics. But not only does Luther believe that the divine person bears a human nature; he also accepts (and this, it seems to me, is his principal metaphysical innovation) that the divine person bears human properties too: Because God and Man are one sole person, it must be said that the person of Christ bears (führe) the properties of the two natures. . . . Hence, that which appertains (zugehöret) individually to one of the natures must be ascribed and attributed (zuschreiben und zueigen) to the whole person.⁶⁰

Since ‘appertains’ is equivocal as to whether or not the properties of a nature are borne by it, the text leaves it an open matter whether human properties are borne by the person immediately or by piggybacking, as outlined in the Introduction. As I shall show in section 3, Luther allows that they are borne by the nature too. So he opts for the second option here, the piggybacking one suggested in passing in Scotus’s discussion of the transitivity of the hypostatic-dependence relation. If this is so, Luther accepts the second metaphysical condition in LH-semantics too. And all this shows us how to interpret the final couple of clauses of the text I quoted on p. 42 above: the two natures ‘communicate their properties to the person, as if he were solely God or solely man’. What Luther means is that the properties are borne by the person, just as they would be in non-Christological contexts, in which the nature and the person are identical. The following very striking passage illustrates in tandem both LS-semantics and LH-semantics similarly: Since God and man have become one person, it follows that this person bears ( fürt) the idiomata of both natures. . . . God in his own nature cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is called God’s death when the man dies who is one substance or one person with God.⁶¹

⁶⁰ Luther, Von Ihesu Christo Warem Gott und Menschen . . . Zwo Predigten . . . aus der Epistel S. Pauli, Colos. Cap. 1: Die Ander Predigt, Von der Menscheit Christi und seinen Ampt, WA 45, 300.37–301.10, quoted in Lienhard, Luther, 338, translation slightly altered. ⁶¹ Luther, Von den Konz., WA, L, 590.3–4, 19–22; LW, XLI, 103, 104. The discussion also provides a good illustration of the way in Luther’s practice is sometimes careless, and does not always conform to his theory. He talks of God’s ‘personally uniting with a man’ (Von den Konz., WA, L, 590.31; LW, XLI, 103), where his theory would permit merely talk of God’s personally uniting with a human nature or humanity.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

57

The man’s dying is clearly something ontological, not merely linguistic; and the man is ‘one substance or one person with God’—that is to say, given LS-semantics, identical with the second person of the Trinity. I return to this passage in section 1.3.2.1 below. Whatever we make of Scotus’s brief discussion, incidentally, I do not think that piggybacking is his own considered view: I think he simply inclines to CNsemantics, as I have made clear above. So it may be that Luther is the first nonmiaphysite theologian expressly to adopt the view that the divine person bears his human accidents and propria. But I do not know for sure. (Neither do I know for sure what the post-Chalcedonian miaphysites would have made of this. Cyril, as we have seen, is a different case.) Given all this, we can perhaps begin to see how the very influential but (as I have just argued) erroneous reading of these texts proposed by Reinhard Schwarz, according to which Luther straightforwardly rejects the supposital union, may have arisen. Schwarz’s key insight is that Luther’s Christology involves the divine person’s ‘completely letting the human nature participate in his personal being’.⁶² The evidence that Schwarz presents in favour of this view is just a catena of texts to the effect that God and man ‘are united in the one person’, or that ‘Christ is God and man in one person’—a standard Chalcedonian claim that, outside Luther’s anti-Zwinglian polemic (which I discuss in section 1.3 below), all sides in the debate admit.⁶³ One would naturally take these kinds of claim to be evidence in favour of Schwarz’s reading of Luther if one supposed (as Brenz does) that one possible referent of ‘man’ was Christ’s human nature. Luther’s ascription of divine properties to the man— something accepted by all sides in the debate, as well as by Luther—would then be evidence of his ascribing them to the human nature. But this would, of course, be the polar opposite of what Luther repeatedly says, very clearly and explicitly. Indeed, the view that the hypostatic union consists in the divine person’s ‘completely letting the human nature participate in his personal being’ is—as we shall see in different ways in Chapters 2 and 4—precisely Brenz’s view. Perhaps Schwarz reads Luther through Brenz’s distorting lenses, thereby engaging in the kind of backwards projection that I counselled against in my Introduction.⁶⁴

⁶² Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch’, 302, quoted in White, Luther as Nominalist, 291. Schwarz’s view is repeated in e.g. Jörg Baur, ‘Ubiquität’, in Bayer and Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura, 186–301 (p. 197); Krüger, Empfangene Allmacht, 43. ⁶³ Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch’, 303, n. 47. Recall Chalcedon’s claim, quoted in section 0.1, p. 1 above, that the two natures ‘[come] together into a single person and a single hypostasis’. ⁶⁴ As I noted in the Introduction, I take Schwarz’s reading overall to have been refuted by White, Luther as Nominalist, 287–93, 392–6. White also provides a quite devastating, if somewhat rebarbative, critique of Schwarz’s highly anachronistic and misleading readings of late Medieval Christology more generally: see White, Luther as Nominalist, 271–80.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

58

 

1.1.2 Zwingli Zwingli shows very little interest in the metaphysical question of the hypostatic union’s nature. He regards the soul–body model as basic, and ignores any possible grounding for the hypostatic union (e.g. in the supposital union). (He may well in fact have known about the supposital union through his reading of Scotus;⁶⁵ he could not have learned it from Luther, since Luther does not discuss it until the disputations of 1539 and 1540, by which time Zwingli was dead. And in any case Zwingli relies far less heavily on Scholastic theology for this topic than Luther does.) Zwingli notes that ‘holy men’ have proposed ‘many images and likenesses (imagines atque vestigia) in order to teach [the union] clearly’.⁶⁶ And of these Zwingli prefers the ‘comparison to a man, who consists of body and soul’,⁶⁷ such that ‘in this way God and man are one Christ’.⁶⁸ He nevertheless expressly accepts Chalcedon’s claims that the hypostatic union consists of the union of two natures in one person—the second person of the Trinity—such that each nature preserves its own character (ingenium): He who is from eternity Son of God is also made to be Son of Man, a man having been assumed (homine assumpto), not such that he who is Son of God gave up the kind (sortem) or form (statum) of divinity, or transformed it into a human condition, but such that God and man should make one Christ, who, inasmuch as he is Son of God, was the life of all . . . and inasmuch as he is man, was the oblation by which eternal justice—which is also his [justice]—was placated. He so joined and united these two natures in one hypostasis or person that each perpetually preserves its proper character (ingenium), excepting this one thing, that the propensity for sinning was very far absent from his humanity.⁶⁹

Talk of an ‘assumed man’ is traditional, if strictly speaking improper (since unless carefully construed it seems to suggest two persons in Christ). As Zwingli himself immediately clarifies, however, the union means that the Son of God is made the Son of Man, which in turn here means identifying the only person in the incarnate Christ as the second person of the Trinity, as in Chalcedon. Zwingli makes the point very clearly elsewhere: Christ assumed the nature of man into the hypostasis or person of the Son of God. It is not as though the humanity taken by him was one person and his eternal

⁶⁵ Zwingli was clearly acquainted with a wide range of Scotus’s thought: see Daniel Bolliger, Infiniti contemplatio: Grundzüge der Scotus- und Scotismusrezeption im Werk Huldrych Zwinglis, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 107 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003). ⁶⁶ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 682.13–14. ⁶⁷ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 682.15–16. ⁶⁸ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 682.16–17. ⁶⁹ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 681.14–682.9.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

59

deity another, but the person of the eternal Son of God assumed humanity in and by its own power, as holy men of God have truly and clearly shown.⁷⁰

The passage makes two metaphysically salient claims. First, the humanity does not count as a person; secondly, the person of Christ is identical with the second person of the Trinity. Zwingli’s Christology, then, conforms to the formal requirements of Chalcedonian orthodoxy as I laid them out in the Introduction.

1.2 Christ’s Human Nature and Divine Attributes: Metaphysical Issues 1.2.1 Luther As we shall see in this section and section 1.3.2.1, Luther holds that the human nature bears created properties. Some of these created properties are the kinds of thing possessed more or less globally. Some are proper to Christ’s human nature— instances of a particular kind of SG-possession. In this section, I consider the latter kind; in 1.3.2.1, the former.

1.2.1.1 Bodily Omnipresence According to the Council of Chalcedon—which Luther silently references in the Eucharistic treatises—in the hypostatic union the two natures are united ‘indivisibly and inseparably’.⁷¹ In the 1528 Vom Abendmahl, Luther uses this insight to defend his view that Christ’s body can be really present in the Eucharistic bread. He argues that the indivisibility and inseparability of the natures should be taken to require spatial inseparability, and hence that Christ’s body is omnipresent (admittedly in some non-spatial mode of presence): If you could show me one place where God is and not the man, then the person is already divided and I could at once say truthfully, ‘Here is God who is not man and has never become man.’ But no God like that for me! For it would follow from this that space and place had separated the two natures from one another and thus had divided the person. . . . He has become one person and does not separate the humanity from himself.⁷²

⁷⁰ Zwingli, Fidei expositio, CR, 93/v, 68.1–6; ET in G. W. Bromiley (ed.), Zwingli and Bullinger, Library of Christian Classics, 24 (London: SCM Press, 1953), 251–2. ⁷¹ See Luther, Vom Abendmahl, MS version; WA, XXVI, 326.14–15; LW, XXXVII, 214: ‘Jesus Christ is essential, natural, true, complete God and man in one person, undivided and inseparable.’ See too Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 324.34; LW, 213: ‘neither confusing the natures nor dividing the person’: Luther here is seemingly adapting or parodying the Quicunque vult or Ps-Athanasian Creed: ‘neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance’, a stricture of Trinitarian theology, not Christology. ⁷² Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 332.33–333.1, 333.8–10; LW, XXXVII, 218–19. See too Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 340.14–21; LW, XXXVII, 228–9 for almost the identical argument.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

60

 

Although the argument starts by treating of the presence of the person (‘God’, ‘man’), by the end of the passage Luther makes it clear that he is in some sense talking about the presence of the humanity (‘Wherever you place God for me, you must also place the humanity for me’).⁷³ A little earlier, Luther states that Christ is everywhere ‘according to his humanity’.⁷⁴ If the claim that Christ’s human accidents are borne by the divine person is Luther’s principal Christological insight, the view that the human nature must be omnipresent constitutes a further signal innovation (though one that, as I shall show in a moment, probably did not originate with him). I assume that the move from concrete to abstract in the text is a way of making it clear that we should not interpret the first sentence simply in standard Chalcedonian terms (such that the man—the second person of the Trinity—is omnipresent in virtue of his divine nature). All this might look like an instance of Schwarz’s claim that the Incarnation requires the divine person’s ‘completely letting the human nature participate in his personal being’, just discussed. But, as I shall attempt to show, it is in fact no such thing. In the displayed passage just quoted, omnipresence is presented as a consequence of the Incarnation as such (as we shall see). This seems to mark a shift in Luther’s thinking, and if so it is one that is worth noting. A year before, in the 1527 treatise Dass diese Worte Christi ‘Das ist mein Leib’ noch feste stellen, Luther had associated bodily omnipresence not with the Incarnation (and thus with Christ’s earthly life) but merely with the Exaltation. The context of the discussion is ‘the article that Christ sits at the right hand of the Father’,⁷⁵ and Luther reasons from this article that the exalted Christ is corporeally omnipresent—something that he does in order to counter Zwingli’s use of the same article to attempt to show that Christ’s body cannot be present in the Eucharist at all.⁷⁶ Why might Luther have changed his mind? Perhaps under the influence of Melanchthon, in whose writings we first find omnipresence associated with the Incarnation. In a letter dating from the same year (1527, a year before Luther’s statement of the view), Melanchthon writes, ‘We should not think that the divinity of Christ is anywhere where the humanity is not. What is this other than to separate Christ?’⁷⁷ We probably cannot say for certain who was the originator of the theory: Luther and Melanchthon were working in close collaboration during the period. But as far as I know this is the first evidence of the theory, so we can at least affirm that it was first propounded in writing by Melanchthon. (As we shall

⁷³ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 333.6–7; LW, XXXVII, 219. ⁷⁴ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 332.22; LW, XXXVII, 218. ⁷⁵ Luther, Dass diese Worte, WA, XXIII, 131.7–8; LW, XXXVII, 55. ⁷⁶ See Luther, Dass diese Worte, WA, XXIII, 143.23–145.2; LW, XXXVII, 63–4. For Zwingli’s view, see e.g. De vera et falsa religione, CR, 90, 807.11–14. ⁷⁷ Melanchthon, Letter 595 (in Melanchthons Briefwechsel: Kritische und kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. Heinz Scheible and others (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991–), T 3, 170.9–12), quoted in Hund, Das Wort ward Fleisch, 69, n. 93.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

61

see in the next chapter, Melanchthon quickly abandoned it and ultimately wholly repudiated it.) One way in which the change manifests itself is in Luther’s treatment of a central biblical passage—Col. 2:9: ‘In whom dwells the whole fullness of the Godhead corporeally’. Although a consideration of Scriptural exegesis is not part of the task I have set myself, the contrast in the way the text is treated in the two treatises is instructive. In both discussions, the verse is taken to be about the Incarnation. In 1527 Luther does not understand the text to be about, or to entail, bodily omnipresence. Rather, he interprets it as asserting the personal union, such that ‘the Godhead itself is essentially and personally present in Christ on earth in so many places, and yet at the same time in Heaven with the Father’—from which ‘it follows that he is everywhere at the same time, and essentially and personally fills Heaven and earth and everything with his own nature and majesty’.⁷⁸ This interpretation asserts not bodily omnipresence but the omnipresence of the divine person ‘essentially’ or ‘with his own nature’— that is to say, qua divine, not qua human. Hence bodily omnipresence—to the extent that it is affirmed in the 1527 text—follows not from the Incarnation but from the Exaltation. In 1528, contrariwise, the context requires Luther to be taking the verse as evidence that the omnipresence of the human nature follows from the Incarnation, not merely the Exaltation. Thus Luther treats the text in the framework of an assertion about Christ’s earthly life, that ‘Christ was in heaven even while he was still walking on earth’,⁷⁹ and expressly denies that ‘corporeally’ should be—as in the earlier text—understood simply to mean ‘essentially’.⁸⁰ The semantic shift has the result that ‘corporeally’ in the verse implies bodily presence wherever the Son of God is. So in the 1527 text, bodily omnipresence is not implied by Col. 2:9, and thus neither by the Incarnation; in the 1528 text, it is.⁸¹ Luther’s presentation of the argument in favour of bodily omnipresence in the first text quoted in this section is rather abbreviated and schematic. Formally, it goes something like this: (P1) If the divinity exists where the humanity does not, then the natures are spatially divided. (P2)

If the natures are spatially divided, the person is divided.

(P3)

The person is not divided.

(C1)

It is not the case that the natures are spatially divided. ((P2) and (P3))

⁷⁸ ⁷⁹ ⁸⁰ ⁸¹

See Luther, Dass diese Worte, WA, XXIII, 141.3–8; LW, XXXVII, 61–2. Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 343.36–7; LW, XXXVII, 232. See Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 347.23–7; LW, XXXVII, 234. For a summary of Luther’s views, see Table 3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

62

  (C2) It is not the case that the divinity exists where the humanity does not. ((P1) and (C1)) (P4)

The divinity is everywhere.⁸²

(C3)

The humanity is everywhere. ((P4) and (C2))

Luther, in short, holds that the correct interpretation of the Chalcendonian ‘indivisibly and inseparably’ requires spatial inseparability, such that not only is the divinity wherever the humanity is, but the humanity is wherever the divinity is. (Note: ‘spatial separability/inseparability’ here is not to be taken to imply spatial location, in a sense to be outlined below. I use ‘spatial separability/inseparability’ just to avoid awkward circumlocutions such as ‘non-spatial co-location’.) Luther sets out this argument non-modally, such that what is relevant is the denial of factual division, not possible division. If he were serious about this a dispute between himself and an opponent could be resolved empirically: as a matter of fact, is there a time at which Christ’s body fails to be omnipresent? If so, it would follow that the person was at that time divided. But the way Luther expresses himself makes it clear that he does not believe a dispute could be resolved in this way. As he puts it, ‘No God like that for me!’ He means us to understand that any incarnate person is indivisible, and the first stages of the argument should be understood modally, such that two-way spatial inseparability—and thus bodily omnipresence—follows from the metaphysics of the Incarnation. Let me label the modalized (P2) the IBS principle (for ‘impossibility of bodily separability’): (IBS) If the natures lack two-way spatial inseparability, the person is not indivisible. The argument just set out is in effect from IBS and indivisibility to bodily omnipresence. IBS is a novel interpretation of Chalcedon, as far as I know, making two-way spatial inseparability a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union and thus making omnipresence a feature of Christ’s body even during his earthly life. IBS is a very strong principle: someone who thought that it was possible for an incarnate person to lack bodily omnipresence—even if only for a time—would by Luther’s lights be required to reject Chalcedonian Christology. And even on the non-modalized version of the argument that Luther sets out, what is incompatible with Chalcedonian Christology is not possible non-omnipresence but actual non-omnipresence. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, some of theologians who presented themselves as the staunchest defenders of Luther’s Christology accepted both possible and actual (albeit temporary) non-omnipresence. So their view is in fact incompatible with Luther’s. Denying IBS—or even just ⁸² Luther does not state this premise as part of the quoted passage, but, as we shall see in a moment, he clearly understands God to be omnipresent.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

63

permanent omnipresence—entails accepting what later became known as the ‘extra Calvinisticum’: the claim that the divine person is not restricted to the location of the human nature. To the extent that Lutheran theologians allow actual non-omnipresence, they accept the extra Calvinisticum, at least for the duration of bodily non-omnipresence. But Luther, accepting IBS, clearly does not. (As we shall see, the inference from personal indivisibility to two-way spatial inseparability— IBS—is on the face of it subject to an obvious set of counterexamples.) As I have just noted, the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature is supposed to be in some sense non-spatial. Luther contextualizes and explains his theory in the light of Medieval theological theories of the body, and his presentation of his position is thoroughly Scholastic. Among other things, it is intended to enable him to explain how it is that a body physically present on the earth can also be omnipresent. Borrowing a distinction from the ‘sophists’ (i.e. the Schoolmen),⁸³ Luther defines the relevant non-spatial mode of presence he has in mind as follows: ‘A body occupies a place repletively, i.e. supernaturally, if it is simultaneously present in all places whole and entire, and fills all places, yet without being measured or circumscribed by any place, in terms of the space which it occupies.’⁸⁴ For a body to be ‘measured or circumscribed’ by a place is for the body and the place ‘to correspond exactly, part by part, just as a pewter-maker measures, pours off, and moulds the tankard in its form’.⁸⁵ (The beer in the tankard, perhaps with its half-pint and pint measures, would have done just as nicely as an example.) This is a standard Aristotelian view of place and location, according to which place is a relation that a body has to what immediately surrounds it, a view accepted by all the Schoolmen.⁸⁶ So a body repletively present occupies the whole universe but not in such a way that its parts and the parts of the universe can be paired off spatially—that is, in the way that the parts of a pewter tankard and its mold can be paired off spatially. So when I talk—as in IBS—of ‘spatial inseparability’ in this context, I mean that two non-spatially present items, two repletively present items, coincide spatially: they non-spatially occupy the same spatial region (namely, the whole universe). Luther discerns a further mode of presence too: An object is in a place definitively, i.e. in an uncircumscribed manner, if the object or body is not palpably in one place and is not measurable according to the dimensions of the place where it is, but can occupy either more room or less. . . .

⁸³ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 327.20; LW, XXXVII, 214. For comparison with Scholastic theories, see Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Eucharistic Presence: Some Scholastic Background to Luther’s Debate with Zwingli’, in Christine Helmer (ed.), The Medieval Luther, Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). ⁸⁴ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 329.27–30; LW, XXXVII, 216. ⁸⁵ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 327.30–2; LW, XXXVII, 215; translation slightly altered. ⁸⁶ See Aristotle, Physica IV, c. 2 (209b31–a1).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

64

  The space is really material and circumscribed, and has its own dimensions of length, breadth, and depth.⁸⁷

Clearly, as Luther affirms, Christ’s body was circumscriptively present for much of his earthly ministry.⁸⁸ And, Luther maintains, it was definitively present ‘when he came out of the grave, and came to the disciples through a closed door, as the Gospels show’;⁸⁹ and ‘just so, Christ can be and is in the bread’ in the Eucharist.⁹⁰ Given that Christ’s body is necessarily repletively present, these claims mean that both circumscriptive presence and definitive presence must according to Luther be distinct from but compatible with repletive presence. At a first pass, it is not obvious how this can be, since both repletive presence and definitive presence, as Luther describes them, are defined in terms that exclude circumscriptive presence, and repletive presence is defined in terms that exclude definitive presence. (To understand this, consider that both definitive and repletive presence are varieties of interpenetration, distinct only by the spatial extent of the interpenetration: definitive presence is by stipulation lesser than repletive, since a body so present ‘can occupy . . . more room’.) Still, this discussion should alert us to the fact that there is nothing particularly curious about Luther’s position on bodily presence from the perspective of late Medieval theology—even if his Christological reason for positing it is novel. Supposing, as the Scholastic theologians did, that Christ’s body can exist in many places in a non-spatial mode in the Eucharist, it is not unintelligible to wonder just how large a place a human body might occupy in this non-spatial mode. In a passage spotted by Hermann Sasse, the Centiloquium once attributed to Ockham (and now believed to be by the Dominican theologian Arnold of Strelley (d. 1349)) affirms the possibility of non-spatial omnipresence in the case of Christ’s body, just as Luther does.⁹¹ Since in the Eucharist Christ’s body can be in many places non-spatially—indeed, in a collection of places far larger than the body’s natural size—why could it not be in all places?⁹² Given this context, we should not, I think, want to ascribe to Luther any kind of theory of the genus maiestaticum in Chemnitz’s technical sense, at least in relation ⁸⁷ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 326.33–327.24; LW, XXXVII, 215. ⁸⁸ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 328.37–329.26; LW, XXXVII, 216. ⁸⁹ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 328.31–3; LW, XXXVII, 216. ⁹⁰ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 329.20–1; LW, XXXVII, 216. ⁹¹ Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1959), 158. See the more extended discussion in Hartmut Hilgenfeld, Mittelalterliche-traditionelle Elemente in Luthers Abendmahlschriften, Studien zur Dogmengeschichte und systematischen Theologie, 29 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1971), 331–43. Hilgenfeld’s very thorough discussion of Luther’s Christology is unfortunately vitiated by a reliance on Schwarz’s misleading analysis of the supposital union, and the mistaken belief that Luther rejects this union: see Hilgenfeld, Mittelalterliche-traditionelle Elemente, 343–68. For the authorship of the Centiloquium, see Hester Gelber, ‘Ockham’s Early Influence: A Question about Foreknowledge and Predestination by Arnold of Strelley, O.P.’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, 55 (1988), 255–89. ⁹² Strelley, Centiloquium, }25 (in Ockham, OPh, VII, 426).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

65

to the question of bodily omnipresence. There is no suggestion here that the omnipresence of Christ’s body is supposed to be the ipsissima omnipresence of the divine essence—one and the same attribute, possessed by both God and Christ’s human nature. The three kinds of presence that Luther outlines are all simply different kinds of relations to places, and the relation between a body and a place need not in any sense be something uncreated. Indeed, the Scholastic theologians expended considerable effort placing these different kinds of relation into different Aristotelian categories (place vs. position, for example), and there is nothing in Luther’s account that suggests anything more metaphysically elevated than this. Christ’s body receives a special mode of non-spatial presence, a particular kind of bodily relationship to all the places that there are in the universe. Now, Zwingli seems to interpret Luther as accepting some kind of genus maiestaticum here. He objects that omnipresence entails infinity—presumably because omnipresence is a divine attribute. (I consider this objection in section 1.2.2.) Luther strongly rejects this reading, and what he says seems to presuppose, with Zwingli, that Christ’s body cannot be infinite. Luther notes that the universe is not infinite, but merely finite in extent, and thus that bodily omnipresence does not entail infinity: ‘[Zwingli] could easily see, if his wrath did not blind him, that this does not follow at all. If the world is not infinite in itself, how should it follow that Christ’s body is infinite if it is everywhere?’⁹³ Luther’s assumption here (and Zwingli’s too) is that infinity is proper to God and the divine attributes: and this is what he denies of bodily omnipresence. Given this, it should come as no surprise that Luther—unlike most of his recent commentators—never describes bodily omnipresence as an instance of the communicatio. And the same goes for the remaining cases of SG-possession that I consider in this section, and to which I now turn.

1.2.1.2 Further Instances of SG-Possession Luther generally links omnipresence with another Christological theme: that at his Resurrection Christ’s human nature received some kind of divine majesty, construed as authority over all creatures: We believe that Christ, according to his human nature, is put over (gesetzt) all creatures and fills all things, as Paul says in Ephesians 4:10. Not only according to his divine nature, but also according to his human nature, he is a Lord of all things (ist ein Herr aller ding), has all things in his hand, and is present everywhere.⁹⁴

This passage couples power and omnipresence, and it affirms the omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body and of Christ in virtue of his body’s omnipresence. ⁹³ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 343.25–8; LW, XXXVII, 232. ⁹⁴ Luther, Sermon von dem Sacrament, WA, XIX, 491.17–20; LW, XXXVI, 342.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

66

 

This discussion is prior to Luther’s acceptance of IBS. But the connection between omnipresence and authority becomes something of a theme in Luther’s later writings. Commenting on Psalm 110:1, he remarks: He [viz. God’s Son] [is] now exalted, in the human nature, to the same glory, so that one must believe and know that Christ the man sits at the right hand of the God and has power over angels, and there is nothing in heaven and on earth that is not under him, and [he] is called true man and true God, sitting at the right hand of the Father, Lord over all creatures, the one who there, in divine majesty and yet also in his human nature, rules over us with power for eternity as our Lord and King, so that we have everything from and through him. And from the fact that he is by nature God’s Son, he has all might and power with the Father.⁹⁵

Here Luther argues that this dominion is something Christ has in his exalted human nature, in addition to his divine nature. The kind of power Luther seems to be interested in here is authority—Christ is ‘Lord’ over all creatures; he ‘rules over us’; he ‘has power over angels’; creatures are ‘under him’. The category is on the face of it moral and judicial, not metaphysical. The text claims that having ‘all might and power with the Father’ follows from the divine nature, for example; perhaps Christ has metaphysical power from the divine nature and maximal judicial authority in virtue of the human. And note again that, unlike omnipresence, this kind of authority is not a necessary consequence of the Incarnation. It is something conferred on Christ’s human nature at his Exaltation. This view on Christ’s moral or judicial power is in fact a Medieval one: as Aquinas puts it, Christ as man is seated at the right hand of God as ‘co-regent’ with the Father,⁹⁶ and consequently as man has ‘judicial power’ over humans⁹⁷ and angels.⁹⁸ What is novel in Luther is the way in which this claim comes to be linked with the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature. (The same connection between omnipresence and power, incidentally, though with no real theory about either attribute as found in Christ’s human nature, is found in Luther’s Wittenberg colleague and exact contemporary Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558): something I mention here because I shall need to return to it in Chapter 3.)⁹⁹ ⁹⁵ Luther, Vom Reich Christi: Der CX. Psalm, Gepredigt und ausgeleget, WA 41, 91.9–18. ⁹⁶ Aquinas, ST III, q. 58, aa. 1, 3. ⁹⁷ Aquinas, ST III, q. 59, aa. 1, 2. ⁹⁸ Aquinas, ST III, q. 59, a. 6. Aquinas’s position was not uncontroversial. Scotus, for example, denied that Christ had such power ‘as man’, while conceding that it was a power of the incarnate divine person: see Scotus, Ord. IV, d. 48, q. 1, nn. 16–19 (Vatican, XIV, 260–2). Scotus interprets Mt 28:14 to mean that the human will of Christ judges simply by following the divine will, with no power or authority of its own: see Scotus, Ord. IV, d. 48, q. 1, n. 35 (Vatican, XIV, 266). ⁹⁹ At a colloquy at Flensburg in 1529, Bugenhagen rejected the Anabaptist Melchior Hofmann’s (c. 1495–1543/44) Zwinglian claim that Christ’s body and blood cannot be in the Eucharist since Christ ‘sits at the right hand of God’ (Acta der Disputatio zu Flensburg die sache des Hochwirdigen Sacraments betreffend (Wittenberg, 1529), 119; ET in Johannes Bugenhagen, Selected Writings, 2 vols, trans. Kurt K. Hendel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 553). Bugenhagen argues that ‘Christ the crucified, who is God and man, should not be separated in any way, for where you find the one you find the other as well. Outside of Christ you find no God. . . . [Christ] is with us . . . with his true humanity because the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

67

Before I move on, I will consider one bit of evidence to the effect that Luther possibly has some stronger kind of claim in mind, more in line with the genus maiestaticum. In a work from 1543, Von den letzten Worten Davids, Luther glosses ‘All things have been delivered to me by my Father’ (Mt. 11:27) and ‘All power (gewalt) has been given to me in heaven and on earth’ (Mt. 28:18) in the following way:¹⁰⁰ Mary’s son is, and is called, through the communicatio idiomatum, almighty, eternal God, who has eternal power (gewalt), and who has created all things and preserves them, because he is one Person with the Godhead and is also very God. . . . I [viz. Mary’s son] had this from my Father from eternity, before I became man, but when I became man, it was imparted to me in time according to my human nature, and I kept it concealed until my Resurrection and ascent into Heaven, when it was to be manifested and glorified.¹⁰¹

Here, the divine person—Mary’s son—has eternal power, and creates and preserves everything, in virtue of the divine nature, as in the genus idiomaticum. But he also has power in two ways in virtue of the human nature: in a concealed way during the earthly ministry, and openly after the Resurrection and Ascension. Is the ‘power’ that he has in virtue of the human nature the same as the divine power he has in virtue of the divine nature? And if so, does this power include the ability to create and preserve all things—is it not just moral authority but metaphysical power? The text is not quite clear. On the one hand, the power that Christ has in virtue of his human nature seems to be ‘eternal power’. On the other, it is not evident that this ‘eternal power’ includes the ability to create and preserve all things, since it is not clear whether or not we should understand function of the third clause (‘who has created all things and preserves them’) relative to the second (‘who has eternal power’) as restrictive or non-restrictive. On the former understanding, the (metaphysical) ability to create is an instance of eternal power—perhaps with moral and judicial authority as a distinct and separate instance. On this reading, nothing about the text requires that Christ’s human nature receive metaphysical power. But on the latter reading, eternal power—the power that was communicated to Christ’s human nature—consists in (among other things) the ability to create and preserve all things. And note that there is a large difference between the two cases: the power to create and preserve all things, however the relation between substances and power is construed, is an intrinsic

Christ who is with us is truly God and man’ (Acta, 121–2; Hendel, 554–5, slightly altered). Here we have Luther’s IBS and the claim that the humanity must be omnipresent. And Bugenhagen notes that ‘sitting’ means ‘to rule’ (Acta, 119; Hendel, 553), giving us the connection between power and omnipresence. ¹⁰⁰ For the Scriptural texts, see Luther, Von den letzten Worten Davids, WA, LIV, 50.3–5; LW, XV, 294. ¹⁰¹ Luther, Von den letzten Worten Davids, WA, LIV, 49.38–50.2, 6–9; LW, XV, 293–4, slightly altered.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

68

 

property, and its possession would require considerable intrinsic restructuring of the human nature; judicial power is something merely extrinsic or relational, conferred simply by a performative utterance. The text is, sadly, ambiguous, and does not compel either reading. Luther—as commentators have frequently pointed out—sometimes expresses himself with undue force; and the remaining ‘power’ texts seem to be about not metaphysical power but merely judicial authority. Indeed, if eternal power here is supposed to be an infinite divine attribute, then the claim made in the text is inconsistent with Luther’s denial, found in the context of his discussion with Zwingli, that the human nature could possess such an infinite divine attribute. Perhaps Luther radically but silently changed his mind: the text postdates discussions of the infinite power of the human nature that we can find in Brenz (on which see section 2.3.2, pp. 102–4), who (if this is the correct reading) would have been an influence. More likely, I think, is a more cautious reading simply in terms of judicial power. The two further possible cases of SG-possession that Luther expressly mentions can also be found in Patristic and Medieval Christological discussions. First, Christ’s humanity is worshipped: ‘The humanity joined with the divinity is worshipped; the humanity of Christ is worshipped, and not falsely, for it is inseparable from the divinity, and the addition of this possessive, “of Christ”, answers the objection.’¹⁰² Luther explains, exegeting Jn 14:9–10: He who touches the Son of God, touches the divine nature itself. . . . Whoever worships the humanity of Christ here no longer adores a creature (for this is what is meant by the union of natures), but the Creator himself, because what explains this is the unity (quia fundamentum est in unitate).¹⁰³

This text perhaps suggests that, just as in the case of omnipresence, what is at issue here is the possession of an attribute by the human nature. But elsewhere Luther offers a different treatment: ‘It is rightly said: the human nature is adored, not in abstracto but in concreto, for there is one person, and one cannot adore God without adoring the man.’¹⁰⁴ This would be in line with the teaching of Constantinople II (553) in this context, which condemns those who believe that the human nature is subject of adoration independently of the person, such that there are ‘two adorations, a separate one for God the Word and another for the man’.¹⁰⁵ All this suggests that what is at stake is not an instance of SG-possession at all, but an instance of the genus idiomaticum: the man is adored because the man is God. (I do not think, incidentally, that we could likewise eliminate bodily omnipresence ¹⁰² Luther, Disp. de div., arg. IX, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 106.3–8). ¹⁰³ Luther, Disp. de div., arg. IX, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 106.19–20, 26–107.2), altered. ¹⁰⁴ Luther, En. 53. cap. Es., WA, XL/3, 709.24–6, translation from Lienhard, Luther, 356, n. 110, altered. ¹⁰⁵ Second Council of Constantinople, anathema 9 (Tanner, Decrees, I, *118).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

69

as an instance of SG-possession, since this is supposed to secure Eucharistic manducation—something which, given Luther’s very physical understanding of it, could not be secured by simple divine omnipresence.)¹⁰⁶ The other attribute that Luther focuses on in the Eucharistic controversy— again a position adopted by some Patristic and Scholastic theologians—is the property of being life-giving.¹⁰⁷ Luther presents a kind of biblical syllogism to show that the Virgin Birth entails that Christ’s flesh is life-giving: We . . . say this: Christ’s flesh belongs with the saying, ‘That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.’ For his flesh was born not of flesh but of the Holy Spirit, as even children and the whole world confess in the creed: ‘I believe in Jesus Christ our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit.’ And the angel said to Joseph in his sleep, Matthew 2 [1:20], ‘Do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.’ And in Luke 1 [1:34–5], when Mary asks the angel how it could be that she would have a child, since she knew no man, Gabriel says, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the holy child which shall be born of you shall be called the Son of the Most High.’ Here you see clearly that Christ’s body is born of the Spirit, and is holy, therefore he must certainly be not flesh but spirit.¹⁰⁸

Here is Luther’s syllogism (the bold passages in the quotation, trimmed of redundancy): That which is born of [the Holy] Spirit is spirit. [Christ’s] flesh is born . . . of the Holy Spirit. Christ’s body is . . . spirit. Provided ‘flesh’ and ‘body’ here mean the same thing, and there is no equivocation in the term ‘spirit’, the argument is valid, inferring the spirituality of Christ’s flesh from the fact of the Virgin Birth. In claiming that Christ’s flesh is spiritual, however, Luther is not making a very strong claim. He defines ‘spiritual’ as ‘alive and blessed forever’,¹⁰⁹ and notes that a body that is spiritual in this sense is capable of conferring the same quality on other bodies when consumed through

¹⁰⁶ Luther quotes with approval the words from Humbert of Silva Candida’s (d. 1061) Ego Berengarius: ‘The true body of Christ is crushed and ground with the teeth’ (Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 442.41–443.1; LW, XXXVII, 300). Quite how this teaching is consistent with Luther’s view that the body is definitively present is not clear to me, since chewing would seem to require commensuration, which is lacking in definitive presence. (The teeth have to be able to separate the parts of what is masticated.) On Ego Berengarius and the Eucharistic theology of Berengar of Tours (c. 1010–88), see Henry Chadwick, ‘Ego Berengarius’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 40 (1989), 415–45. ¹⁰⁷ The claim was asserted in the eleventh anathema at the Council of Ephesus (431) (Tanner, Decrees, I, 61a). ¹⁰⁸ Luther, Dass diese Worte, WA, XXIII, 201.13–27; LW XXXVII, 98–9. ¹⁰⁹ Luther, Dass diese Worte, WA, XXIII, 205.16; LW, XXXVII, 100–1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

70

 

eating. These claims fully in line with Patristic and Medieval theology, and there is nothing particularly innovative about them.¹¹⁰ Given all this, I think we should be very surprised if it were to turn out that, after all, Luther systematically conceives of SG-possession in terms of the genus maiestaticum. Accepting a genus maiestaticum in something like Chemnitz’s technical sense requires some explicit metaphysical commitments on the identity of the human nature’s supernatural attributes. But beyond what I have outlined in terms of the relation between Christ’s body and place, and some possible hints about omnipotence, Luther offers no reflection on the metaphysics of the issue at all. And what consideration there is expressly denies that Christ’s human nature could be in any sense the subject of infinite attributes. As I shall suggest in Chapter 2, if we want to find the origins of the genus maiestaticum as such in a theologian working during Luther’s lifetime, we need to look not to Luther but to Brenz. Admitting this does not mean that what Luther says about SG-possession is not central to his theology—and in certain ways much more central than it is to Scholastic Christologies, for the reason that bodily omnipresence does considerable theological work of an explanatory kind for Luther, and this is obviously lacking in Scholastic theology.¹¹¹ But the work that it does is seemingly unrelated to the metaphysics and semantics of the hypostatic union, which is the question I am interested in here. What we learn by attention to these issues is that Luther seems to have no conception of the genus maiestaticum in anything like its later form, and no acceptance of SG-possession other than that which could have been conceived of by a Medieval theologian.

1.2.2 Zwingli Zwingli strongly opposes, on metaphysical grounds, the possibility of the omnipresence of Christ’s body. Zwingli’s principal objections are Scriptural, and not relevant to my task here. But he proposes two related philosophical arguments. The first is that Christ’s body moved around on earth, and, in particular, moved into Heaven at the end of his earthly life. And, as Zwingli notes, motion within the universe is impossible for an omnipresent being.¹¹² The second is that omnipresence entails spatial infinity, and no created substance can be spatially infinite. As

¹¹⁰ Aquinas, for example, quotes Cyril to the same effect at ST III, q. 79, a. 1 c. ¹¹¹ Some of this work is outlined conveniently in Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 21–64. See too Bayer, ‘Das Wort ward Fleisch: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation’, in Bayer and Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura, 5–34. ¹¹² Zwingli, Eine klare Unterrichtung vom Nachtmahl Christi, CR, 91, 835.22; Bromiley, 219; see too Zwingli, Fid. exp., CR, 93/v, 144.20–145.7; Bromiley, 257.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

71

Zwingli sees it, anything spatially infinite must be eternal—temporally infinite, or something like it. And no created substance is temporally infinite.¹¹³ (I have mentioned Luther’s response to this above: that omnipresence does not entail infinity.) Zwingli understands the relevance of non-spatial presence in this context, incidentally. He holds, rather like Strelley, that Scholastic theories of the Eucharist entail possible omnipresence: ‘it is the same thing to be in many places and to be everywhere’; unlike Strelley, of course, he maintains that such theories are false: omnipresence is ‘proper only to [Christ’s] divine nature’.¹¹⁴ Zwingli refuses to allow any cases of SG-predication. In addition to the non-spatial presence already considered, he discusses two of the Patristic and Scholastic Eucharistic cases that Luther recounts: being worthy of worship, and being life-giving. In both cases, Zwingli has, given his denial of any extramental Eucharistic presence, strong polemical reasons for denying that these attributes belong to the human nature—though of course they belong to the divine nature.¹¹⁵ The context of the discussion of the first of these is a complex argument to the effect that, if Luther holds that Christ’s flesh is worthy of worship, and if he holds that it is truly present in the Eucharist, then he should permit Catholic practices such as Eucharistic adoration. Luther, of course, has motivations both political and theological for not wanting to allow such things, and Zwingli accuses him of inconsistency as a result. In the course of the discussion, Zwingli asserts that ‘everyone abolishes the humanity of Christ by adoration’¹¹⁶—which is to say that it is incompatible with the humanity that it be the object of worship—and that if we can find instances of the Church Fathers (the ‘ancient’ theologians) and even the Scholastics (the ‘recent’ theologians) affirming such adoration, then we should take it to be a case of alloiosis (on which see the next section) according to which we say one thing but mean something else: All, as much the ancient as the recent theologians, never permit that the pure or bare humanity of Christ (for thus they speak) can be adored; and if some such can be found, it should not be understood other than of the stronger nature, that is, the divine, through alloiosis.¹¹⁷

Zwingli talks about the ‘pure or bare humanity’, and the Scholastics denied that the humanity thus described could be worthy of worship.¹¹⁸ But the point is that cases in which we speak of the adorability of the human nature should always be ¹¹³ Zwingli, Daß diese Worte: ‘Das ist mein Leib’ etc. ewiglich den alten Sinn haben verden, CR, 92, 929.12–933.12; see too Zwingli, Fid. exp., CR, 93/v, 143.2–3; Bromiley, 256. ¹¹⁴ Zwingli, Vom Nachtmahl Christi, CR, 91, 838.28–9; Bromiley, 221. ¹¹⁵ I say ‘extramental’ because Zwingli does have an account of Eucharistic presence: ‘The faithful have the body and blood of Christ present in their minds’ (Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 589.4). To believe something, or to think about it, is a way of making it present, as the Medieval Aristotelians knew well enough in teaching that the thought of an object in some sense brings that object into the mind. ¹¹⁶ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 654.15–16. ¹¹⁷ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 658.6–10. ¹¹⁸ See e.g. Aquinas, ST III, q. 25, a. 2 ad 1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

72

 

understood to mean that the divine nature is adorable—contrary to the surface meaning of the relevant locutions. Zwingli treats of the life-giving nature of Christ’s flesh in exactly the same way. The context is a discussion of Jn 6:63, ‘It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is of no avail’. Zwingli laconically comments, Behold, the Spirit giving life to you. Why therefore did he so often attribute life to the flesh? ‘Who eats my flesh has eternal life’ etc. [Jn 6:54]. Because he was the life-giving God, whom they believed to be bare man. Whenever he attributed life to the flesh, he used the word ‘flesh’, but understood the Spirit, that is, his divinity, κατ’ ἠθολογίαν [i.e. by imitation], therefore, and mimesis, which are species of alloioses: that is, by imitation, by which he spoke according to the language and opinion of his enemies.¹¹⁹

Here, again, Zwingli claims that locutions in which divine properties are ascribed to the human nature are true only if the subject term refers not to the human nature but to the divine nature.¹²⁰ Jesus, Zwingli claims, spoke in the way that he did because his audience understood him to be merely human. To make them realize that he was life-giving—which he was only because his divine nature was life-giving—Jesus needed to talk of his flesh. But he meant his divinity. Whatever we think of Zwingli’s prowess as an interpreter of Scripture, the theological point is clear: Christ’s human nature cannot be the subject of SG-predication.

1.3 The Semantics of the Communicatio Idiomatum In section 1.1 I dealt with, among other things, predication ‘in natural matter’, in which a nature is predicated of a person. Here I turn specifically to the semantics

¹¹⁹ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 607.27–608.3. ¹²⁰ Again, there are precedents for this view in Medieval theology. Scotus, for example, while he acknowledged many cases of SG-possession, does not consider the possibility that Christ’s flesh in the Eucharist was life-giving. Thus, he interprets Jn 5:21 (‘Christ gives life to whom he will’: see Scotus, Ord. IV, d. 48, q. 1, n. 4 (Vatican, XIV, 257)) either as a case of ‘appropriation’ (ascribing to one divine person what is proper to the whole Trinity) or as a case of an activity ‘that pertains solely to the deity’ (see Scotus, Ord. IV, d, 48, q. 1, n. 37 (Vatican, XIV, 266–7)). There is no mention of the vivifying power of Christ’s body in Bonaventure, either, as far as I know, and it is a general Franciscan view, contrasted with that of the Thomist Dominicans, that a created substance can have no causal role in the production of a supernatural effect—something which has a striking effect on Franciscan views of the role of the sacraments as mere occasions for wholly divine activity: on this, see my ‘On the Polity of God: The Ecclesiology of Duns Scotus’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 7 (2007), 29–45 (pp. 31–6; at p. 41, n. 30, I note a similarity to Zwingli’s views on the sacraments). I do not mean to endorse any kind of ‘forerunner’ thesis with respect to the relation between Medieval and Reformation theology. The debate between Luther and Zwingli on this issue is simply the continuation and extension of an earlier Medieval one, though arguably one informed more systematically by biblical exegesis. Thus far I have sometimes been using Aquinas as a representative of a typical Medieval position on a given topic. I have been doing this for the sake of convenience and familiarity. But note well: there is good evidence that as late as the seventeenth century the majority of Catholic theologians still in general followed Scotus: see F. Bąk, ‘Scoti schola numerosior est omnibus aliis simul sumptis’, Franciscan Studies, 16 (1956), 144–65.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

73

of locutions in which the predicate terms signify not natures but properties as such. I begin with Zwingli, because, as a matter of history, questions of semantics were first raised in this debate not by Luther but by Zwingli, as a reply to what Zwingli saw as Luther’s deviant metaphysics—since as Zwingli conceived of the matter Luther was misled into making false metaphysical claims about bodily omnipresence on the basis of mistaken semantics. I then consider Luther’s reply to Zwingli’s position.

1.3.1 Zwingli In response to Luther’s claims about bodily omnipresence, Zwingli offers a number of considerations. I have already discussed the principal metaphysical ones (on the impossibility of bodily omnipresence). But what became the key bone of contention in the Christological debate relates specifically to the communicatio idiomatum. As the examples just discussed make clear, Zwingli objects to the idea that the human nature might be subject to any kind of divine attribute. So, when discussing the communicatio, he offers the following diagnosis of Luther’s mistake in relation to SG-possession (specifically, bodily omnipresence): Luther ‘cunningly jump[s] across from one nature to the other’.¹²¹ The Lutheran ‘jump’ that Zwingli objects to consists in ascribing the properties of one nature to the other: a ‘subject-jump’, so to speak, between the natures as such. He thus in effect understands Luther’s affirmation of SG-possession as an instance of the genus maiestaticum (to use the later terminology). (We have already seen Luther’s response, denying that this is the correct understanding of his position.) Zwingli thinks that there is a sense in which these kinds of cases are covered by the communicatio, but he claims that what is at stake is merely some kind of wordplay. He does not believe, however, that these are the only kinds of cases covered by the communicatio. Zwingli uses the term ‘alloiosis’ to talk both about Luther’s supposed subjectjump and about the communicatio more generally, and he first offers a general account of alloiosis before giving a specifically Christological definition. Here is the general account: Alloiosis, which we have understood as a ‘jumping’ (desultoria) locution (named by Plutarch), is a trope in which the customary order or meaning (ratio) is changed, when there is a leap (saltus) or alteration (permutatio) from one to the other, on account of some likeness (affinitatem) of grammatical features (passionum grammaticarum).¹²²

A number of salient points emerge from this. First, alloiosis is a ‘trope’, a figure of speech: a locution in which the semantic content of the locution is broader than its ¹²¹ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 679.1–2.

¹²² Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 679.6–10.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

74

 

sentential content—in which what is meant differs from what is said. Secondly, and perhaps obviously, the figurative sense is distinct from the literal sense. Thirdly, the cause of the figurative status of the relevant locution can be syntactic (the ‘order’ of the terms) or semantic (the ‘meaning’ of the terms). And, finally, there must be some appropriate resemblance between the literal sense and the figurative sense of the locution. Clearly, an assumption is that the figurative sense can be true whether or not the literal sense is.¹²³ The Christological application is straightforward: ‘Alloiosis is . . . that jump (desultus) or change (transitus) or, if you prefer, alteration (permutatio) by which, speaking of the one nature in him [viz. Christ], we use words pertaining to the other.’¹²⁴ Zwingli expressly states himself to be following the earlier ‘theologians’—the Scholastics, in other words—simply changing one technical term (‘communicatio idiomatum’) for another (‘alloiosis’).¹²⁵ But what he says varies between cases in which the relevant locutions involve nature-predication and those in which they involve hypostasis-predication. The first kinds of cases—those that involve an analysis of nature-predication— are relatively straightforward, and I have already given examples of them in the previous section of this chapter. (Let me call this ‘type-one’ alloiosis.) Zwingli refuses any talk of (e.g.) the participation of the human nature in divine attributes. Zwingli’s example is ‘my flesh is true food’.¹²⁶ He comments: ‘flesh in him [viz. Christ] is proper to the human nature, although by commutation it is posited in this place for the divine nature’.¹²⁷ Christ says one thing, related to the flesh, but means something else, related to the life-giving divine nature. Here, we have Luther’s subject-jump, between the natures as such; Zwingli claims that in such cases the reason for treating the locution as figurative is simply that the intended subject of predication is distinct from the subject in the uttered locution. It is Zwingli’s disagreement with Luther (as Zwingli understood him) on this kind of alloiosis that opened up the whole issue of Christological semantics in the course of the debate between the two. Zwingli’s treatment of the second kind of case (type-two alloiosis)—in which the subject of the relevant locution is the person—is very different from this; and, as we shall see, Zwingli’s talking about them both as cases of the same linguistic phenomenon—alloiosis—led to considerable confusion on the part of ¹²³ It would be a worthwhile task—one that I do not have space for—to compare what Zwingli says about alloiosis with classical theories of metaphor and tropological predication, for example in Quintilian, as well as in Plutarch. ¹²⁴ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 680.1–681.1. ¹²⁵ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 679.14–15. Zwingli prefers his term on the good humanistic grounds that it has a classical origin—Plutarch, as Zwingli believes: see Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 679.8; according to the editor of the Amica exegesis (F. Blanke), the source is probably ps.-Plutarch, De vita et poesi Homeri, II, 41 (in Plutarch, Moralia, ed. G. N. Bernardakis, 7 vols (Leipzig, 1888–96), VII, 356). ¹²⁶ John 6:55, quoted in Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 681.1. ¹²⁷ Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 681.2–3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

75

his opponents. In these cases, there is no subject-jump: the jump is simply a matter of the terminology employed to signify one and the same subject. Thus the use of ‘words pertaining to the other’ nature occurs not in the subject-term (as in typeone alloiosis) but in the predicate term: a predicate-jump, not a subject-jump. And Zwingli treats these cases all as figurative because even in type-two alloiosis the surface meaning of an uttered predication such as ‘God dies’ is not that God has a nature that dies, but that the creator of the universe simply ceases to be. It is thus straightforwardly false. But the figurative sense—that God has a nature that dies— is, according to Zwingli, true. Zwingli divides the predicates up between the natures, and endorses locutions of the form ‘the nature φs’ (i.e. he endorses non-trivial nature-predication): ‘The divinity of Christ does miracles, enters the mind, dwells here; and the humanity is thirsty, suffers pain, and dies.’¹²⁸ And Zwingli ascribes all of these predicates to the person of Christ. Commenting on ‘The Son of Man is in Heaven’,¹²⁹ Zwingli remarks: ‘He who was the Son of Man, was, according to his divinity, but not according to his humanity, in Heaven with the Father, whom he never deserted.’¹³⁰ Given that these attributes can be truly predicated of the appropriate nature, we should interpret ‘was, according to his divinity . . . in Heaven’ as ‘his divine nature was in Heaven’; and given that ‘He who was Son of Man’ is Christ, ‘The Son of Man is in Heaven’ should be interpreted as ‘Christ has a divine nature that is in Heaven’: that is to say, we should understand what is meant by the predication in line with CN-semantics. Just like type-one alloiosis, these predications are figurative, since the surface meaning does not line up with what is actually meant. But there is a crucial difference between the two cases. In type-one alloiosis, we have a subject-jump: what is said is untrue of the subject because the grammatical subject refers to something that the correctly interpreted utterance fails to be about; in type-two alloiosis, the grammatical subject refers successfully to what the correctly interpreted utterance means, and we have instead a predicate-jump: the breakdown in meaning is just that the predicate should be interpreted along the lines of CNsemantics. So there is no subject-jump in type-two alloiosis; the subject is the hypostasis, and all that happens is that the sense of the predicate shifts. Zwingli makes similar points elsewhere. For example, ‘One and the same Christ did all of these things [viz. divine and human actions], even though he had diverse natures and qualities.’¹³¹ And he is the subject of these predications only in virtue of possessing natures that bear the relevant properties: In Holy Scripture all references to Christ relate to the whole and undivided Christ, even when it can easily be seen to which nature the saying is to be referred

¹²⁸ ¹²⁹ ¹³⁰ ¹³¹

Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 683.2–4. John 3:13, quoted in Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 684.10–11. Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 92, 684.18–19. Zwingli, Expositio fidei, CR, 93/ii, 793.25–6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

76

  (referendum sit). Christ is never divided into two natures, although that which is proper to each nature is referred (referantur) to it. For the possession of two natures does not destroy the unity of the person. . . . And conversely even though that which is proper to his divinity is attributed (tribuitur) to his humanity, and that which is proper to his humanity is attributed to his divinity, yet the two natures are not confused.¹³²

So we can truthfully predicate divine and human attributes of Christ, and of the person under a given natural description (e.g. ‘God’, ‘man’: that is to say, as Zwingli puts it, attributing a predicate ‘to his divinity’ or ‘to his humanity’). And note Zwingli’s terminology: predication is ‘attributing’ (tribuere); propertypossession is ‘being referred’ (referri).¹³³ I shall return to this in section 3.1.1, p. 123.¹³⁴ We shall see some of the subsequent history of Zwingli’s analysis in the following chapters. As far as I can tell, theologians adopting Zwingli’s approach to Christological semantics used only this second account of alloiosis—the one specifically relevant to CN-semantics. Type-one alloiosis as Zwingli presents it drops out of the picture. What happens instead is either that some of the predications are treated as literally true (e.g. such that ‘Christ’s flesh is life-giving’ is literally true: Christ’s flesh bears the property of being life-giving, as Calvin asserts, for example), or that they are understood to be disguised type-two alloioses, construed along the lines of CN-semantics (e.g. such that ‘Christ’s flesh is life-giving’ means ‘Christ (referred to by “Christ’s flesh”) has a nature that is life-giving’—viz. the divine nature—as Melanchthon later suggests). I discuss all of this in subsequent chapters. If this analysis is correct, it shows among other things that, as a matter of fact, Zwingli is the direct inheritor of one very significant aspect of Alexandrian Christology—specifically, a version of the CN-semantics defended by Athanasius and Cyril. I am aware that this is not the usual interpretation of Zwingli. From Luther onwards (as we shall see in a moment), Zwingli was portrayed in Lutheran

¹³² Zwingli, Fid. exp., CR, 93/v, 143.9–16; Bromiley, 256 (slightly altered). ¹³³ Though it is admittedly true that his terminology is more fluid than one might like: I give some examples in my ‘Alloiosis in the Christology of Zwingli’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 46 (1995), 105–22 (pp. 109–13). ¹³⁴ The belief that Zwingli’s semantics commits him to denying the truth of any predication in the genus idiomaticum is widespread even today. Consider the following from a still highly influential work on Christology: ‘Zwingli saw in the communication of attributes a mere figure of speech: one can say things about the person that, strictly speaking, are true only for one of the two natures, but any such statement has only [a] figurative sense, it is only a praedicatio verbalis. Zwingli said nothing of a real community between Christ’s divine and human natures lying at the basis of that figurative speech’ (Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, 299). If my argument to this point has shown anything, it should have shown that at least the first of these sentences is false, and the second true only if we deny that the hypostatic union is itself a form of community of natures. And on the face of it there is no greater community of natures for Luther than there is for Zwingli.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

77

circles as tending in a Nestorian direction, following more broadly Antiochene traditions in Christology. This, it strikes me, is a complete misunderstanding of Zwingli’s position. Some of Zwingli’s followers do indeed point out relevant passages from Cyril—including CN—in defence of the orthodoxy of CNsemantics. Just how Luther came to make his mistake is part of the topic of my next subsection.

1.3.2 Luther 1.3.2.1 The Semantics of the Communicatio Idiomatum For Luther, Zwingli’s view that the natures are the only property-bearers means that the natures are the only subjects of predication. And the view that the natures are the only subjects of predication straightforwardly implies Nestorianism: If Zwingli’s alloiosis stands, then Christ will have to be two persons, one a divine and the other a human person, since Zwingli applies all the texts concerning the passion only to the human nature and completely excludes them from the divine nature. But if the works are divided and separated, the person will also have to be separated, since all the doing and suffering are not ascribed to natures but to persons. It is the person who does and suffers everything, the one thing according to this nature, and the other thing according to the other nature, all of which the educated know perfectly well.¹³⁵

Here Luther claims that it is the person who is the ultimate bearer of actions and passions. He thus accepts a very strong version of the Scholastic principle actiones sunt suppositorum—actions are of (belong to) supposita—according to which version the ‘belonging’ relationship should be construed not merely as a linguistic one but also as an ontological one.¹³⁶ Thus, as we have seen, one of Luther’s conspicuous Christological beliefs is that the divine person bears not only his human nature but also his human properties.¹³⁷ And the passages that show this

¹³⁵ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 324.25–32; LW, XXXVII, 212–13, slightly altered. ¹³⁶ Alain de Libera has shown that this principle originates in Aquinas (see ‘Les actions appartiennent aux sujects: petite archéologie d’un principe leibnizien’, in Stefano Caroti and others (eds.), ‘Ad ingenii acuitionem’: Studies in Honour of Alfonso Maierù, Textes et études du Moyen Âge, 38 (Louvainla-Neuve: FIDEM, 2006), 199–219). It is not clear to me whether Aquinas thinks the principle could be satisfied merely by a linguistic relationship, or whether it requires that the suppositum is the ontological subject of its action: see for example his discussion of the action of a substance’s parts at ST I, q. 75, a. 2 ad 2, which could be read in either way. (I discussed this briefly in the Introduction.) The classic text in Aquinas is ST II-II, q. 58, a. 2 c. ¹³⁷ Luther sometimes talks of the natures ‘mixing’ their attributes: ‘one speaks of the communication of attributes when one unites and mixes (vermischt) the properties of the two natures in Christ, in the same way that one unites and mixes the natures, God and the man, in one person’: Luther, Von Ihesu Christo Warem Gott und Menschen . . . Zwo Predigten . . . : Die Ander Predigt, WA, XLV, 300.14–15,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

78

 

most clearly (quoted in section 1.1.1.3, p. 56) make a claim about propertypossession that is quite general: it is not just actions and passions that are borne by the person, but human properties generally. If this is the correct interpretation of Luther, we can quickly see that the core of his rejection of Zwingli is not the fact that alloioses are figurative. It is that these predications presuppose that the divine person does not bear any salient human property—which Luther takes to mean, against Zwingli’s express assertions to the contrary, that the relevant predictions are false. Saying this does not mean that Luther does not object too to the claims Zwingli makes about figurative locutions in this context. He does, complaining that on Zwingli’s understanding, type-two alloioses are instances of irony, and that Scripture should not be read in this way.¹³⁸ But this is a worry about Zwingli’s biblical hermeneutics, not his account of the Incarnation. (After all, accepting CN-semantics is not the only way in which a theologian might come to maintain that all hypostasis-predication in Christology is figurative.) Having said this, it is nevertheless the case that, as I mentioned in section 0.2.1, p. 20, someone accepting LH-semantics could not accept that all non-trivial Christological predications are figurative. (It would be worthwhile to tie this discussion of alloiosis into Luther’s more general theory of Scriptural interpretation: but that is not a task for this book.) Luther holds that the divine person bears human properties not immediately but by piggybacking. For example, the discussion of SG-predication in section 1.2 above presupposes that the human nature is the subject of non-trivial properties. And some passages in the 1540 disputation make the same thing clear too. In this discussion, Luther wants to show that ‘Christ is a creature’, correctly interpreted, has a true sense. He does this by noting that Christ is a creature since ‘he has a creature, or has assumed a human creature, or, what is simplest, the humanity of Christ is a creature’.¹³⁹ Being a creature is ascribed to Christ on the grounds that he ‘has’ a nature that ‘is a creature’. To the extent that being a creature is a proprium of Christ’s human nature, it is a property of the divine person too. If this reading is correct, Luther asserts too the final conjunct in LH-semantics, and thus endorses the whole principle. To return to the main point I wish to make here, I now present some more evidence in favour of Luther’s acceptance of the view that the divine person bears human properties. In Von den Konziliis und Kirchen, discussing the Council of Ephesus (431), Luther believes Nestorius’s error to have been to suppose (rightly) that God was man, but (wrongly) that God did not thereby become subject of the

quoted in Lienhard, Luther, 344. I suggest that we interpret this way of talking in a similar way: the person is indiscriminately the metaphysical subject of the properties associated with both natures. ¹³⁸ See Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 319.21; LW, XXXVII, 209. ¹³⁹ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 56 (WA, XXXIX/2, 96.18–20).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

79

accidents of the human nature. In contrast, as Luther puts it in a passage part of which I quoted above, We Christians must ascribe all the idiomata of the two natures of Christ . . . equally to him. Consequently Christ is God and man in one person because whatever is said of him as man must also be said of him as God, namely, Christ has died, and Christ is God; therefore God died—not the separated God, but God united with humanity. . . . If it seems strange to Nestorius that God dies, he should think it equally strange that God becomes man; for thereby the immortal God becomes that which must die, suffer, and have all human idiomata. Otherwise, what would that man be with whom God personally unites, if he did not have truly human idiomata? . . . On the other hand, whatever is said of God must also be ascribed to the man, namely, God created the world and is almighty; the man Christ is God, therefore the man Christ created the world and is almighty. The reason for this is that since God and man have become one person, it follows that this person bears ( fürt) the idiomata of both natures.¹⁴⁰

Here, Luther first of all (roughly) asserts the necessity of adopting LH-semantics for Christological predications (‘whatever is said of him as man must also be said of him as God’), and presents the opposing view as maintaining that God was man but without bearing human accidents. As he puts it elsewhere, Nestorius’s view (as understood by Luther) requires accepting that God was man, and that ‘The carpenter Jesus was crucified by the Jews and the same Jesus is the true God’, but denying that ‘God was crucified by the Jews’: ‘he [viz. Nestorius] says, “No! For crucifixion and death are idiomata or attributes not of divine but of human nature” ’.¹⁴¹ Luther’s thought is that the divine person cannot be characterized by human accidents unless he bears human accidents. Perhaps understandably, Luther associates the view that the divine person does not bear human accidents with Zwingli: ‘I too have been confronted by Nestorians who fought me very stubbornly, saying that the divinity of Christ could not suffer. For example, Zwingli . . . ’.¹⁴² But note that what Zwingli denies is that the divinity of Christ could suffer in abstracto, something that Luther himself too denies, as we shall see; what Luther and Zwingli both accept is that God could suffer, in concreto. Again, Luther’s belief that true predications of the form ‘x is φp’ need to be grounded in predications of the form ‘x is Φp’ misleads him into misdescribing Zwingli’s position. The failure of the divine person to bear the human accidents does not mean that human accidents do not characterize him, provided we adopt an appropriate semantics—which is just what Zwingli does, or so I have been arguing.

¹⁴⁰ Luther, Von den Konz., WA, L, 589.21–590.4; LW, XLI, 103. ¹⁴¹ Luther, Von den Konz., WA, L, 588.7–11; LW, XLI, 101. ¹⁴² Luther, Von den Konz., WA, L, 591.9–11; LW, XLI, 105.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

80

 

Another piece of evidence in favour of Luther’s acceptance of LH-semantics for Christological predications, more tangential, is worth considering too. Someone committed to LH-semantics needs some way other than that available to the adherent of CN-semantics to deal with putative Christological contradictions. One available approach is simply to opine that the attribution of seemingly contradictory predicates to one and the same object—at least, to one and the same divine person—is no bar to the truth of those various predications. And this approach seems to be in Luther’s mind. Rather than shy away from asserting such predicates of Christ, Luther seems to revel in it. Recall, for example, the claim made in the 1539 disputation, discussed in section 1.1.1.2 above, according to which ‘this predication, “God is a man” is not less but rather more inconsistent (disparata) than if you were to say, “A human being is a donkey” ’. On CNsemantics, the predications are not ‘simply impossible and absurd’, whether really or merely apparently. I take this to be evidence of a sort that Luther accepts LH-semantics, and in the domain of theology is not troubled by the apparent contradiction. (Luther does not hold that the Christological predication under discussion is in fact contradictory. As we have seen, Luther maintains that the same predication can be true in theology and false in philosophy. What he means is that the predication is false if construed in line with the restrictions in Porphyry’s predicables, in which one natural kind cannot be predicated of another.)¹⁴³ So part of Luther’s distinctive interpretation of Zwingli on the genus idiomaticum springs from his acceptance of LH-semantics. Another part can be isolated if ¹⁴³ As Bengt Hägglund has shown, this would not be a two-truth theory: it is not that the predication is true in one domain and false in the other, but simply that it is not included in one of the domains at all: see his Theologie und Philosophie bei Luther und in der occamistischen Tradition: Luthers Stellung zu der Theorie von der doppelten Wahrheit (Lund: Gleerup, 1955). Luther is comfortable with paradox and apparent contradiction in other contexts too. As early as his disputation on Scholastic theology (1517), he aligns himself with those Medieval theologians who deny that Trinitarian theology is amenable to Aristotelian syllogistic—though distances himself from those ‘new dialecticians’ (that is to say, the Dominican Robert Holcot (c. 1290–1349) and his followers) who hold the view that Trinitarian theology requires a paraconsistent logic, distinct from and more restrictive than Aristotle’s, and governed by additional logical rules: see Luther, Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam, theses 46–9 (in Luther, Studienausgabe, ed. Hans-Ulrich Delius, 5 vols (Berlin: Evangelische Verlangsanstalt, 1979–92), I, 169; LW, XXXI, 12); on Holcot’s logic of the Trinity, see the text and introduction in Robert Holcot, Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God, ed. Hester Goodenough Gelber, Studies and Texts, 62 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983). Neither semantic nor logical means can ameliorate the conceptual difficulty of the Trinity; so for Luther, human reason has, it seems, no way to make the doctrine coherent. The beauty of Holcot’s position, incidentally, is that positing non-standard inference rules enables him to block inferences to contradictions without appealing to Ockham’s identical predication outlined above. He thus insulates the doctrine of the Trinity from what logicians colloquially call ‘explosion’: the fact, known from at least the twelfth onwards, that a true contradiction entails the truth of all propositions, factual, counterfactual, and impossible, alike. Luther’s analysis in terms of identical predication shows how the language of theology can circumvent similar worries about the logical coherence of Christology. Philosophy has no metaphysical relation sufficient to enable one and the same suppositum to be signified by distinct natural-kind terms. Theology does—namely, the supposital union—and in virtue of this the difference in signification of the terms ‘God’ and ‘man’ is no bar to them suppositing for the same thing.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

81

we trace further components of the dialectic in Luther’s own discussion. What we see is that—as I have already briefly adumbrated—Luther mistakes Zwingli’s two different cases of alloiosis. In one typical discussion, Luther begins by considering a case of type-one alloiosis: ‘Christ’s body is in the bread.’¹⁴⁴ Here, as Luther (rightly) sees it, Zwingli would substitute the divine nature for the human to secure the truth of the predication—so in this case there is nature-predication and the associated subject-jump. Luther immediately considers a case of type-two alloiosis—one that Zwingli would interpret in a way consistent with CNsemantics, and that does not involve the subject-jump that Luther supposes it to, but merely a predicate-jump: He [viz. Zwingli] calls it alloiosis when something is said about the divinity of Christ which after all belongs to his humanity, or vice versa—for example, in Luke 24[:26], ‘Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?’ Here he performs a sleight-of-hand trick and substitutes the human nature for Christ.¹⁴⁵

Luther’s point, in other words, is that Zwingli would claim that there is no sense in which ‘Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory’ is true, and that the relevant true locution is ‘the human nature should suffer and so enter into [its] glory’. But this is not Zwingli’s view at all. As Zwingli deals with cases of type-two alloiosis, they are true of the grammatical subject, albeit under an appropriate interpretation of the predicate: it is true that the person of Christ ‘should suffer and so enter into his glory’, and it is true because Christ has a nature that does these things—just as in CN-semantics. So Luther has again been misled by Zwingli’s terminology into treating the two cases of alloiosis as the same kind of linguistic phenomenon, involving a subject-jump. The complex dialectic here, incidentally, starting from Zwingli’s conflation of two quite distinct linguistic phenomena under the same heading of alloiosis, may begin to explain why recent scholars have tended to think of instances of SG-predication in Luther as cases of the communicatio. As we have seen, in none of these discussions is there any thought that the human nature bears divine properties, or that the divine nature has human properties. In his semantics of concrete and abstract nouns, outlined in this section and section 1.1, Luther goes out of his way to avoid any such possibility. I have shown this in great detail for the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘humanity’. Luther says exactly the same thing in the divine case too. ‘God is dead’ is permissible, ‘the divinity is dead’ is not, because the former subject-term, but

¹⁴⁴ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 317.35; LW, XXXVII, 207. ¹⁴⁵ Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 319.29–33; LW, XXXVII, 209. For a similar discussion, see too Vom Abendmahl, XXVI, 321.19–322.27; LW, XXXVII, 210–11.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

82

 

not the latter, signifies just one divine person, and thus supposits for that person in sentences in which it supposits for what it signifies: When . . . it is said, ‘The divinity is dead,’ then it is implied that the Father too and the Holy Spirit have died. But this is not true, for only one person of the divinity, the Son is born, dies, and suffers, and so on. Therefore the divine nature, when it is taken for a person, was born, suffered, died, and so on, and this is true.¹⁴⁶

The divine nature ‘taken for the person’ is the divine person, signified by ‘God’, and Luther here explicitly denies that the properties of one nature can be attributed to the other. Indeed, the discussion presupposes that anything ascribed to the divinity here is ascribed to all three persons, and not properly to the divinity at all. We should interpret the last clause of the following in the light of the semantic rules outlined thus far: Question: it is asked, whether this proposition is true: The Son of God, the creator of heaven and earth, the eternal Word, cries out from the Cross and is a man? Response: This is true, because what the man cries, God also cries out, and to crucify the Lord of Glory is impossible according to the divinity, but it is possible according to the humanity; but because of the unity of the person, this beingcrucified is attributed to the divinity as well.¹⁴⁷

Given that the response expressly claims that it is impossible to crucify the Lord of glory ‘according to his divinity’, the only way to make the text coherent is to understand ‘this being-crucified is attributed to the divinity as well’ to mean that it is attributed to the divine person, as in LH-semantics.¹⁴⁸ (As I made clear above, my guiding assumption is to interpret practice in terms of theory, and to assume theoretical coherence whenever I can. It would be possible to interpret the last sentence differently; but in that case we both abandon Luther’s official theory and ascribe incoherence to him.)¹⁴⁹

1.3.2.2 The Definition of the Communicatio Idiomatum What Luther says about the concrete/abstract distinction gives us the key to the interpretation of his official definitions of the communicatio idiomatum. Here is one, found in the Enarratio on Isaiah 53: ‘The Fathers called this the communicatio idiomatum, when each nature communicates its properties to the person ¹⁴⁶ Luther, Disp. de div., arg. XV (WA, XXXIX/2, 110.7–11). ¹⁴⁷ Luther, Disp. de div., arg. V, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 103.20–31); see too arg. XXXIII (WA, XXXIX/2, 120.21–121.2). The same goes for Luther, Disp. de div., arg. III (WA, XXXIX/2, 102.24–7). ¹⁴⁸ The discussion of Christological semantics that I have just offered should immediately show that Luther rejects any kind of genus tapeinoticum, ascribing human properties to the divine nature. ¹⁴⁹ Baur, for example, sees passages such as the last clause of the one just quoted as evidence that Luther has, in the 1540 disputation, shifted from his 1528 view that the attributes of one nature cannot in general be predicated of the other: see Baur, ‘Ubiquität’, 205. But this is the correct interpretation only if we are prepared to ignore similar bans clearly articulated in the later disputation—as in the passage just quoted—and, in short, to ascribe to Luther a rank contradiction.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

83

who is the Son of God.’¹⁵⁰ Just as in Biel’s definition given in the Introduction, what is at issue is the predication of divine and human attributes of the one person. But although this expresses Luther’s actual theory (as I shall show), it is not what he usually says. Luther typically defines the communicatio in terms, rather, of a relationship between the two natures. Here is one version, given at the beginning of the 1540 disputation De divinitate et humanitate Christi: ‘Because of the undivided union and the unity of the two natures there is brought about the communicatio idiomatum, so that what is attributed to one nature is attributed to the other as well, because there is made one person.’¹⁵¹ Elsewhere in his writings, Luther refers to the natures communicating their properties to each other: ‘The two natures dwell in the Lord Christ, and yet he is but one person. These two natures retain their properties, and each also imparts its properties to the other (miteinander teilen ihre Eigenschaften).’¹⁵² I take it that these two definitions are, for semantic purposes, the same. In neither case, however, should we understand this talk of ‘natures’ to signal a distancing from LH-semantics. Rather, they should be understood in conformity with the first definition just considered: ‘nature’ in these definitions means person (in a given nature, or as referred to in a given nature). These formulations— talking about the relationship between the natures—are in fact traditional, and simply reflect John of Damascus’s, discussed in the Introduction. We have seen something similar in Biel too. Ockham likewise uses language very close to Luther’s, and reminds us to understand ‘nature’ here in the concrete—i.e. to signify person: The divine and human natures remain distinct after the union, just as before. . . . But notwithstanding this distinction between the natures, nevertheless the natures communicate to each other their properties, through predication in the concrete, as in this: ‘The Son of God is incarnate, is dead, suffered’, and likewise ‘a man created the stars’.¹⁵³

Of course, Luther is not Ockham. But Luther says enough on the semantics of concrete and abstract nouns for us to be sure that he would agree with Ockham here. The question is the supposition of the term ‘nature’ itself in Luther’s definition of the communicatio (‘what is attributed to one nature is attributed to

¹⁵⁰ Luther, En. 53. cap. Es., WA, XL/3, 703.19–21. ¹⁵¹ Luther, Disp. de div., praef. (XXXIX/2, 98.8–10). See also Luther, Disp. de div., arg. III, A version (WA, XXXIX/1, 102.19–20); arg. V, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 103.20–1); arg. XI, A version (WA, XXXIX/2, 106.19); arg. XIb (WA, XXXIX/2, 108.8–9). ¹⁵² Luther, Auslegung des dritten und vierten Kapitels Johannis, WA, XLVII, 199.26–8; LW, XXII, 491–2, quoted in Dennis Ngien, ‘Chalcedonian Christology and Beyond: Luther’s Understanding of the Communicatio Idiomatum’, Heythrop Journal, 43 (2004), 54–68 (p. 59), altered. See Luy’s discussion of this text in Dominus Mortis, 120–33. ¹⁵³ Ockham, Rep. III, q. 1, a. 1 (OTh, VI, 10.16–17, 11.2–5). I assume that Ockham is likewise following John of Damascus, though his phraseology is slightly further removed than Luther’s is.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

84

 

the other as well’). In principle, the issue is ambiguous, because ‘nature’ could supposit for things signified by concrete or abstract nouns (e.g. ‘man’, or ‘humanity’). Luther’s general practice makes it clear that in these definitions he is talking about things signified by concrete nouns (‘man’, ‘God’). The communicatio idiomatum as Luther describes it involves predicating concrete terms (concrete substantives and adjectives) of other concrete terms (concrete substantives). As we have seen, Luther’s semantics of concrete terms has them signifying (and thus in these contexts suppositing for) the person: (the) God, (the) man. When Luther talks in these contexts about attributing things to a nature, he is in fact talking about attributing things to a person—the nature-terms that he has in mind are concrete terms signifying persons, not natures, as in his account of the signification of concrete and abstract terms described in section 1.1 above. Again, a careless or hasty reading of the Lutheran texts is liable to mislead.¹⁵⁴

1.4 Luther’s Originality: A Brief Note If my argument here is correct, Luther’s originality should fundamentally be located in his acceptance of LH-semantics, and I take this to be Luther’s principal Christological insight. Given this analysis, Luther is perhaps the first Chalcedonian theologian to articulate Behr’s ‘modern’ concept of person in the Christological context—namely that the second person of the Trinity is the ontological subject of his human properties. As we shall see, Luther is followed on this issue by Brenz and many other later Lutherans, albeit in the context of some very different metaphysical and semantic assumptions. (It would doubtless make a fascinating history to trace the interactions of Lutheran Christology and Cartesian theories of the ego in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) Luther’s subsidiary contribution is his adherence to IBS, a principle of course central to his understanding of Chalcedon, and thus a novel if controversial contribution to the history of Christology—albeit one that probably originated in Melanchthon. As we shall see, this claim about bodily omnipresence takes on a life of its own in the later Lutheran tradition, in ways that sometimes barely resemble the original model at all. And certainly both the Lutheran tradition and its opponents, all the way back to Zwingli, for the most part imagined that IBS was Luther’s most distinctive claim. Zwingli does not seem to have noticed Luther’s

¹⁵⁴ In the first (1570) edition of De duabus naturis, Chemnitz offers the following astute observation on the definition of the communicatio offered by John of Damascus: ‘Of this type [of confusion of concrete and abstract, taking abstract nouns for concrete ones] is that which Damascene, in book 3 c. 4 [of Exp. fid.] repeats from the ancients: “This is the manner of the exchange by which each nature communicates its own properties to the other.” In [this example] it is clear how . . . abstract terms are posited for concrete ones’ (Chemnitz, De duabus naturis in Christo (Jena, 1570), fol. Q1v). I discussed and quoted the relevant passage from John in the Introduction.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

85

LH-semantics with its claims about the metaphysical relation between the divine person and his human accidents. So what might we say on Luther’s role in the development of the genus maiestaticum? Luther may not himself have introduced the genus maiestaticum into theological discourse—indeed, I have argued here that he did not; as I shall attempt to show, Brenz has this particular honour. But Luther nevertheless bequeathed to his successors a potent and beguiling mix of ideas that may have helped catalyse reflection on the matter. Three things, in particular, stand out: bodily omnipresence, the IBS principle, and the stress on the majesty and power of Christ’s exalted human nature. Let me take these in turn. Luther’s understanding of bodily omnipresence was, I have argued, wholly Scholastic and Medieval. But Zwingli did not interpret it that way. Zwingli argued that omnipresence entails infinity. Since he rejected the view that Christ’s human nature was infinite, he reasoned that Christ’s body was not omnipresent. Luther’s Medieval understanding of the nature of body allowed him simply to reject the inference from omnipresence to infinity. But—as we shall see—later Lutherans accepted the consequence, and instead of rejecting infinity accepted the contrapositive of Zwingli’s argument: since the body is omnipresent, it is infinite, and thus can be characterized by a divine attribute—in some sense or other to be specified. It might, secondly, be tempting to generalize the IBS principle to cover other divine attributes too—for example, if IBS is construed not just as a principle about spatial and personal indivisibility, but as an instance of a specific mereological principle that what is true of the whole must be true of the parts, or as a general Christological principle to the effect that what is true of the divine person must be true of the human nature too. And it might, thirdly, be especially easy to generalize the principle if Luther’s talk of the power conferred on the Exalted human nature be construed not morally or judicially but metaphysically, as a kind of omnipotence. There is an obvious connection between omnipresence and omnipotence, for example, if we suppose immediate action at a distance to be impossible. But none of these moves, it seems to me, were made by Luther himself.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

2 Early Lutheran Christologies

Melanchthon was Luther’s deputy and, after Luther’s death in 1546, the leader of the Church in Wittenberg. In the 1530s, however, he took his Christology in a very different direction from that initiated jointly by Luther and his earlier self, and while he accepted the supposital union, he in effect abandoned both of Luther’s characteristic insights: LH-semantics and bodily omnipresence—and indeed, SG-possession more generally. In their place he came explicitly to affirm CN-semantics, and adopted something like Zwingli’s rigid refusal of any kind of SG-possession. But if Melanchthon and eventually the Church in Upper Saxony tended in a direction away from SG-possession, the Church in Swabia, initially under the influence of Brenz (the de facto leader of the Church in Württemberg, part of the Duchy of Swabia), ultimately moved in quite the opposite direction. As early as 1528 or 1529 Brenz seems to have accepted the genus maiestaticum in the technical sense outlined above, and spent the rest of his career refining the account to deal with problems The development of Brenz’s view is the topic of the second half of this chapter, and of part of the opening of Chapter 4. There were manifold divisions in early Lutheranism, and by no means do they simply track this Christological disagreement. Here I am interested only in the Christological discussion. The 1577 Formula of Concord, which I discuss in Chapter 6, constituted an attempt to resolve all of these divisions, including the Christological ones. It is fair enough to say that, on Christological matters, the formula is much closer to Brenz’s view than it is to Melanchthon’s. There is no doubt that these two theologians formulated their opposing views with conscious knowledge of the other’s opinion, and we will see some evidence of this below, though as far as I know they did not expressly address each other in their Christological writings.

2.1 Melanchthon’s Early Christology We have only the barest sketch of what Melanchthon may or may not have thought on Christological matters in the early stages of his career.¹ He says ¹ On Melanchthon’s Christology and its development, see Hund, Das Wort ward Fleisch, 66–96; Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 56–85, 182–94. Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

87

nothing about the genus idiomaticum at all, and nothing on the metaphysics of union. As I pointed out in section 1.2.1.1, p. 60, in 1527 Melanchthon formulates something like the IBS principle. Indeed, as I suggested there, he seems to have been the originator of it. In 1530, Melanchthon perhaps begins to distance himself from it: We say that it is not necessary for the body of Christ to be in one place. Again, we say that it can be simultaneously in many places, whether that is brought about locally, or in the other arcane way in which the diverse places of the person of Christ are simultaneously present, like one point. For this reason we posit the true and real presence of the body of Christ with the bread.²

Here Melanchthon does not expressly commit himself to omnipresence, and affirms no more than something like multivolipraesentia—the power (potentia) of Christ’s body to be in many (multi) places at will (voluntas), and (in this case) to be so definitively. Melanchthon allows both spatial and non-spatial multilocation, presumably to drive home the difference between his position and that of the Strasburg Reformed theologian Martin Bucer (1491–1551), whom he is here addressing. The observation that non-local presence resembles the presence of a point brings out very nicely that such presence does not involve bodily extension (understood along Aristotelian lines, such that the extended body has parts that are distant from each other). In the same year Melanchthon also published a catena of writings from the Church Fathers, showing their agreement with Lutheran ideas on Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist. Among them are the following sentences from Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on Jn (6:53), presumably quoted with approval: ‘His [viz. Christ’s] body vivifies. . . . The flesh of the Saviour, conjoined to the Word of God which is life by nature, is made vivifying. . . . His flesh, which is conjoined to him, is vivifying.’³ Being life-giving is something that results from the union— from being ‘conjoined to the Word of God’. So here Melanchthon is happy with accepting some form of SG-possession.

2.2 Melanchthon’s Later Christology 2.2.1 Melanchthon’s Christology, 1533–50 As Johannes Hund has noted, Melanchthon’s Christology underwent a number of shifts, the first of which occurred in the 1533 text of Loci communes (a draft, of

² Melanchthon, Iudicium de Zwinglii doctrina (Epistolarum. Liber V, no. 798), CR 2, col. 222. ³ Melanchthon, Sententiae veterum aliquot scriptorum de Coena Domini, CR 23, cols. 736–7, quoting Cyril of Alexandria, In Joann. IV, c. 2 (ed. P. E. Pusey, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), I, 529.25, 530.3–5, 11–12).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

88

 

which only fragments survive), more or less repeated in the 1535 edition.⁴ In this work, Melanchthon moves decisively away from Luther’s Christology. He silently drops SG-possession, and seems to adopt in schematic form CN-semantics— though, again, without admitting so explicitly. Melanchthon here says very little on the metaphysics of the hypostatic union, but what he fails to say seems quite as significant as what he does say. On the metaphysics, Melanchthon is clear in accepting the main structures of Chalcedonian Christology. He affirms that Christ is the same person as the second person of the Trinity: ‘The Son, at a determined time, assumed a human nature from the Virgin Mary. Christ is that Son, one person, composed of two natures (constans ex duabus naturis), divine and human.’⁵ Melanchthon does not cite Chalcedon’s claim that each nature ‘preserves its own property’, but instead devotes a considerable portion of his discussion to providing Scriptural evidence in favour of the view that Christ includes a divine nature—which probably presupposes something like the Chalcedonian position. The reason for Melanchthon’s approach is a wish to avoid what he saw as the error of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus (1509/1511–53), who ‘made a subterfuge ( fucum) for the reader, as though the esteemed ancient authors felt that the Logos was not a person before he put on human nature’.⁶ On the metaphysics of the union itself, Melanchthon appeals not to the soul– body analogy but to a parallel one, that of fire and iron.⁷ In terms of the metaphysics, however, this perichoretic model does little work for him, and Melanchthon expressly affirms that the only kind of property-sharing is symmetrical, from the two natures to the person: If it is objected that, while Christ died, the divine nature cannot suffer or die, there is a commonplace (vulgaris) solution that is necessary: since there are two natures in Christ, some things are proper to one which do not prevent it being the case that the other nature is present. Now, these things are proper to the human nature: to suffer, to die, and similar things. . . . Hence there arose the rule about the communicatio idiomatum, customary in the Schools, by which this can be done reasonably. This is a figure of speech by which a property pertaining (conveniens) to one of the natures is attributed (tribuitur) to the whole person in concreto, such as ‘God is man’, ‘Christ died’.⁸

Here Melanchthon identifies the communicatio idiomatum as an instance of hypostasis-predication. And, in Zwinglian style, he sees the communicatio

⁴ Hund, Das Wort ward Fleisch, 76. ⁵ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 355. ⁶ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 359. ⁷ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 360, referring to Origen, De principiis II, c. 2, 6 (ed. and trans. John Behr, 2 vols, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), II, 210–12). ⁸ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 363.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

89

idiomatum as a ‘figure of speech’. As we saw in the Introduction, Melanchthon later—in the third edition (1547) of the Erotemata dialectices—comes to think of these Christological predications as non-standard rather than figurative, and includes among such predications not merely ‘God is man’, ‘the Word is made flesh’ (as we saw above), but instances of the communicatio such as ‘Christ suffered’, ‘God suffered’.⁹ The first two editions of the text (1520 and 1527, respectively) do not include the relevant discussion. I assume that sometime between 1535 and 1547 Melanchthon changed his mind on the question of the figurative status of such predications. Be that as it may, the discussion here clearly affirms that the properties are predicated of the person, and like Zwingli, Melanchthon uses ‘attributed’ to talk about this predication relation. The term I have translated as ‘pertaining’ (i.e. ‘conveniens’) is rather neutral, and does not seem to require, or perhaps even to be susceptible to, an obviously metaphysical interpretation. It means something like ‘appropriate to’, or ‘coming together with’, neither of which suggests either bearing or even predication. ‘Proper to’, a little earlier in the text, is likewise neutral. I assume that something has to have the relevant properties, and in this passage it certainly is not the person. But Melanchthon says nothing more explicit. Melanchthon also fails to affirm any form of SG-possession. When considering the evidence in favour of Christ’s divinity, Melanchthon appeals to Christ’s divine properties: ‘The Son gives life to those whom he will’;¹⁰ ‘The Holy Spirit receives from me, John 16[:15]. But the Holy Spirit gives life. Therefore, since he receives from the power of Christ, it is necessary that the power of Christ is divine.’¹¹ And Melanchthon infers from Christ’s omnipotence that he has a divine nature.¹² In all of these cases, the relevant claims are understood simply of the person: we ascribe these divine properties to the divine person, and we do so on the grounds that he has a divine nature. SG-possession is likewise absent from the Eucharistic discussion in the same work. Melanchthon asserts no more than that ‘Christ is present in his sacrament, and efficacious in us’, and that ‘given the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, the body and blood are shown to us’.¹³ Earlier, Melanchthon adds that ‘Christ . . . gives us his body’.¹⁴ But none of these activities is described in terms that ascribe to the human nature of Christ any supernatural gift or function. The presence and efficacy are the person’s; the human nature, to the extent that it has any function at all, is simply a non-causal medium between a divine power (to ‘give’ or ‘show’ the body to believers) and the believers (to whom the body is given or shown). Equally, Melanchthon’s analysis of non-standard (inusitata) predication given in section 0.2.1, p. 20, shows that at least by 1547 Melanchthon has come to reject ⁹ Melanchthon, Erot. dial., CR, 13, col. 525. ¹¹ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 361. ¹³ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 479.

¹⁰ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 360. ¹² Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 364. ¹⁴ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 477.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

90

 

Luther’s view that the Eucharistic presence could be understood in terms of consubstantiation, and the relevant locutions be analysed in terms of identical predication (on which, see section 1.1.1.2, pp. 49–52). The reason is that Melanchthon maintains in this discussion that the only cases of non-standard predication—predications which are neither in conformity with Pophyry’s predicables nor figurative—are Christological. Luther, as we have seen, made a great deal of Col. 2:9 in his 1528 defence of bodily omnipresence. There is no trace of this reading in the 1535 Loci. Melanchthon offers the following exegesis: ‘In others God dwells spiritually, that is, he brings about new motions in them. In Christ he dwells corporeally, that is, in reality, or substantially, or, as we say, naturally, such that the nature or substance of Christ is divine.’¹⁵ There is no deification of the human nature here, merely an assertion of the hypostatic union. What I have just provided represents an argument from silence in favour of Melanchthon’s distancing from Luther’s Christology. But given Melanchthon’s express acceptance of IBS and SG-possession earlier in his life, it is hard not to be struck by the force of this silence. As we shall see, Melanchthon comes to make his differences from Luther’s Christology unambiguous—albeit without drawing attention to the distance between Luther and himself.

2.2.2 Melanchthon’s Christology, 1550–60 In the last decade of his life, Melanchthon’s Christology underwent several significant developments.¹⁶ First, Melanchthon comes to affirm the supposital union, something that seems to mark a decisive break from his rather attenuated discussion of union in the 1535 Loci. He also comes explicitly to accept CNsemantics. Finally, just as in the 1535 Loci, he says very little about SG-predication; and indeed he expressly denies both bodily omnipresence and the body’s vivifying power. To see all this, we need to focus not on the 1559 edition of the Loci, which does not move conceptually much beyond the 1535 edition, but rather at other works of the last decade or so of Melanchthon’s life: notably, the Enarratio symboli niceni (1550), the Explicatio symboli niceni (1557), the Enarratio on Colossians (1557), and the Responsiones ad articulos Bavaricae inquisitionis (1558).¹⁷ (I will ¹⁵ Melanchthon, Loci (1535), CR, 21, col. 361. ¹⁶ Hund locates the decisive break not in 1550 but in 1557 (Das Wort ward Fleisch, 87), because he is more interested in the development of the Eucharistic debate. But I hope my reasons for dividing the territory up in the way that I do will become obvious. Nothing much substantive turns on these taxonomic questions. As Hund notices, Melanchthon affirms the supposital union as early as 1550 (Hund, Das Wort ward Fleisch, 80). I discuss the texts in a moment. ¹⁷ For a thorough discussion of the Enarratio on Colossians, see Timothy J. Wengert, ‘Philip Melanchthon’s 1557 Lecture on Colossians 3:1–2: Christology as Context for the Controversy over the Lord’s Supper’, in Irene Dingel and others (eds.), Philip Melanchthon: Theologian in Classroom,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

91

in passing highlight relevant passages from the 1559 Loci, simply because of the importance of the text.) On the metaphysics of the hypostatic union, the 1559 Loci remains content with more or less recapitulating the perichoretic Christology of the second edition.¹⁸ We find the same in the Enarratio on Colossians too: marking the salience of the soul–body union, Melanchthon interprets Col. 2:9 in conformity with his treatment in the 1535 Loci, noted above, and uses this ‘personal indwelling’ as a way of distinguishing between the hypostatic union and other forms of divine presence in the universe.¹⁹ As he puts it in the Responsiones, personal indwelling constitutes the discrimen or distinction between ‘Christ and Elijah’.²⁰ But both of the works on the Nicene Creed repeatedly affirm the supposital union. For example: The divine person bears ( gestat) the human nature, such that it is its sustainer and conserver (sustentrix et conservatrix). And although the property of each nature remains, nevertheless, because the divine person sustains and conserves the human, and the person is one, these propositions are true in concreto: God is man, God suffered.²¹

Melanchthon does not say much about the nature of this sustaining relationship, but he seems to understand it—contrary to the way it appears in Scotus—in fundamentally causal terms, such that what is at stake is the divine person’s sustaining the nature in the sense of conserving it. In other respects, Melanchthon’s account is close to that of Scotus. At one point, Melanchthon makes clear that what is assumed is a particular, a ‘chunk’ (massa) of human nature: ‘The assumed nature has such an order to the assuming person that this chunk would not exist unless it were thus assumed.’²² Like Scotus, then, Melanchthon also conceives of the relation between the human nature and the divine person as a kind of ‘order’. Melanchthon also uses Scotus’s dependencelanguage: ‘the divine person is the end term of the dependence of the assumed nature’,²³ and he accepts the broadly Scotist definition of ‘person’: ‘It was said above, a person is an individual, intelligent, incommunicable substance; add this:

Confession, and Controversy, REFO 500 Academic Studies, 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 209–35. On the Responsiones, see Robert Kolb, ‘Melanchthon’s Last Will and Testament: The Responsiones ad articulos Bavaricae inquisitionis as His Final Confession of Faith’, in Dingel and others (eds.), Philip Melanchthon, 141–60. ¹⁸ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), in Melanchthon, Werke in Auswahl [= Studienausgabe], ed. Robert Stupperich, 7 vols (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1951–75), II/i, 193.32–194.4. ¹⁹ See En. ep.ad Col., c. 2 (CR, 15, col. 1253). ²⁰ Melanchthon, Responsiones ad articulos Bavaricae inquisitionis, St. A., VI, 375. ²¹ Melanchthon, En. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 341. ²² Melanchthon, Expl. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 369. ²³ Melanchthon, Expl. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 369.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

92

 

which is not sustained or conserved in another.’²⁴ Perhaps we should take ‘in another’ as a way of distinguishing the relevant kind of dependence from causal dependence (which would more naturally be expressed as ‘by another’). But Melanchthon is not as explicit about this as we might like, and reading his account it would be natural to come to the conclusion (which Brenz later comes to, as I show in section 4.2.1, pp. 145–6) that the relevant kind of sustaining is indeed simply causal sustaining. According to Melanchthon, then, what grounds both the union of natures and the communicatio idiomatum is the supposital union. In all of the works under discussion in this section, Melanchthon explicitly accepts nature-predication and CN-semantics for the genus idiomaticum; and he expressly rejects the possibility of the omnipresence of Christ’s body. So, first of all, naturepredication: ‘The human nature could die. . . . Being crucified, dying, are properties of the human nature’;²⁵ ‘The human nature was truly tortured (cruciatus), and died.’²⁶ And these properties are predicated of the divine person: ‘These properties [of the natures] are attributed to the divine person in concreto. . . . Christ suffered, but in his human nature, which could die. . . . The properties of one nature are attributed to the person in concreto.’²⁷ (Again, ‘attributed to’ is a sign of a predication relation.) And Melanchthon is fully aware that this is the teaching of Athanasius: Athanasius, in De incarnatione, says: Since it was not possible for the Word himself, the immortal Son of the Father, to die, he received to himself a body which would die, so that the body, made a participant of the Word, died for everyone, while the indwelling Word remained incorruptible.²⁸

We can find the same position in the 1559 Loci too: The divine nature was not wounded and did not die, but was obedient to the Father.²⁹ . . . Do not think that the human nature alone was the redeemer, and not the whole Son of God. . . . For this reason, these rules are held in this teaching of the communicatio idiomatum, that is, of the predication of properties which are generally said of each nature, though in concreto, so that the properties are understood to be attributed to the person.³⁰

So here, we allow nature-predication (‘the divine nature was obedient to the Father’; ‘the human nature . . . was the redeemer’—albeit not alone but with the ²⁴ Melanchthon, En. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 342. ²⁵ Melanchthon, En. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 343. ²⁶ Melanchthon, Expl. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 371. ²⁷ Melanchthon, En. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 343. ²⁸ Melanchthon, Expl. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 371, referring to Athanasius, De incarnatione, c. 20, 6 (Sur l’incarnation du Verbe, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, Sources Chrétiennes, 199 (Paris: Cerf, 1973), 340). ²⁹ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 198.20–2. ³⁰ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 199.6–8, 10–15.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

93

divine nature), but in such a way that the person was, in virtue of these claims, characterized by these various predicates: hence, CN-semantics. Like the 1535 edition, the 1559 Loci talks about Christ’s divine properties as properties of the person, and is silent on the possibility that these could be properties of the human nature too. That Christ is adorable, has infinite power (and is thus omnipresent), and is life-giving, all show that he has a divine nature.³¹ In none of these cases does Melanchthon mention the possibility that these attributes might be shared with the human nature (or the human properties with the divine nature). The Explicatio symboli niceni is more explicit: It is never said in abstracto, ‘the divinity is dead’, or ‘the divine nature is dead’, because what is signified in abstracto is the nature considered according to itself, and [in this case] there is attributed to this nature that which is contrary to the nature, as when I say, ‘blood, or the nose, counts’.³²

The rule Melanchthon states precludes a genus maiestaticum (as well as the genus tapeinoticum, which is the specific focus of the quoted passage).³³ We talk of the communicatio ‘in concreto’ because the communicatio as such relates merely to hypostasis-predication. The treatment of the Eucharist in the 1559 Loci, while perhaps slightly less minimalist on the question of bodily presence than that in the 1535 edition, still signally fails to ascribe any non-natural properties to Christ’s human nature as such. Any activity is ascribed wholly to the person: ‘Christ is truly present (revera adest), giving, through this ministration (ministerium), his body and blood to the one who eats and drinks.’³⁴ Melanchthon denies the view that the Eucharist is merely ‘a memorial of a dead man’,³⁵ and the view (that, as we shall see in section 3.3.1, pp. 137–9, Calvin came to hold) that Christ’s body is present ‘only by power (efficacia)’.³⁶ What he says takes as its starting point a comment on Jn 6:56 (‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them’) offered by Cyril of Alexandria: ‘Christ is in us not only by love (dilectionem), but also by natural participation.’³⁷ Melanchthon glosses (without mentioning the Johannine context), ‘that is, he [viz. Christ] is present not only by power but also by substance’.³⁸ ³¹ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 187.30–188.2. ³² Melanchthon, Expl. sym. nic., CR, 23, col. 371. ³³ Erdmann K. Sturm quotes a student report of Melanchthon’s lecture on Colossians 3 to the effect that any inference from predication in concreto to predication in abstracto is fallacious: ‘It is therefore a fallacy to infer from that which is rightly said, “Christ is everywhere”, that “therefore his body is everywhere”, for the one has a concrete [subject], and the other an abstract [one]’: see Sturm, Der junge Zacharias Ursin: Sein Weg vom Philippismus zum Calvinismus (1534–1562), Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche, 33 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1972), 75, n. 59. Given CN-semantics, we can infer from predication in abstracto to the correlative predication in concreto, but not vice versa. ³⁴ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 522. ³⁵ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 523. ³⁶ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 522. ³⁷ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 522, roughly quoting Cyril, In Joann. X, c. 2 (II, 542.22–4). ³⁸ Melanchthon, Loci (1559), St. A., II, 522.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

94

 

The gloss is ambiguous—perhaps deliberately so. Given the Johannine context, we might naturally think that the ‘substance’ that is being talked about is the substance of Christ’s body. But without the context, it looks as though it is merely the substance of the person that is at issue, and that what is being affirmed is that by eating the Eucharistic elements we are made to participate in God’s substance, the divine nature. I assume, nevertheless, that the substance is indeed intended to be the body, else the point of the intended contrast with Calvin’s view is missed (since Calvin of course asserts the presence of the person; what is at issue is the presence of the body). Calvin’s ‘power’ understanding of presence involves ascribing a particular causal role to the body, a life-giving power that is clearly an instance of SG-possession. Melanchthon, by way of contrast, seems to hold that the body has no role in the divine person’s life-giving activity. And unlike Calvin, who has some kind of theory of Christ’s Eucharistic presence (in terms of power), Melanchthon does nothing more than affirm presence by substance, with no account of what such presence might amount to.³⁹ In the Enarratio on Colossians, Melanchthon expressly denies bodily omnipresence after the Ascension (and, a fortiori, during Christ’s earthly ministry). Melanchthon sets himself three questions in relation to Christ’s Session at the right hand of God (Col. 3:1), discussing in particular ‘he ascended into Heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father’ from the Apostle’s Creed: first, what does ‘ascended into Heaven’ mean; ‘again, what are the properties of a glorified body; again, what does “Christ is in you, Christ is your life” mean?’⁴⁰ In relation to the first, Melanchthon is very explicit in denying any legitimate non-literal sense to the relevant locution: ‘the phrase should be understood as the words sound, about a body and a bodily location’.⁴¹ Talk of ‘a bodily and physical place’ and ‘a heavenly place . . . are not to be thought to be allegories’, and the contrast between physical place and heavenly place is between a place here below and a place ‘above (sursum)’. Melanchthon claims not to know where ‘a heavenly place’ is (‘wherever that is’), but this is an expression of cosmological or astronomical agnosticism, not a concession to possible omnipresence. Thus Melanchthon goes on to note that while it is true ‘by the communicatio idiomatum’ that ‘the Logos is always in Heaven’, ‘Heaven’, in the context of the Ascension, is ‘where (ubi) the Word made flesh did not previously sit, that is, where the body ³⁹ So I dissent from Wengert’s view (in ‘Philip Melanchthon’s 1557 Lecture’, 212, 218, 223) that bodily presence in this case has something to do with the communicatio idiomatum. First, the communicatio for Melanchthon, as should by now be amply apparent, has to do only with the (presence of the) person, and nothing to do with the presence of the human nature (the body) (though note that denying bodily presence to be in virtue of the communicatio does not involve denying bodily presence tout court). Secondly, it is not clear just what SG-possession Melanchthon wishes to ascribe to Christ’s body in the Eucharist, or what it is for the body to be present. He is, I think, deliberately vague on the matter. ⁴⁰ Melanchthon, En. ep. ad Col., c. 3 (CR, 15, col. 1270). ⁴¹ All quotations in this paragraph are from Melanchthon, En. ep. ad Col., c. 3 (CR, 15, col. 1271).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

95

previously did not have bodily location (corporalem locationem)’. In Heaven, Christ’s ‘body is somewhere, locally (localiter), according to the true mode of a body’. Likewise, the proposition ‘Christ is everywhere (ubique)’ is ‘true by the communicatio idiomatum’—that is to say, it is true of Christ in virtue of his divine nature. So Christ’s ascended body has ‘bodily location’, and is present ‘locally’, and only the divine nature (and the divine person, in virtue of the divine nature) is omnipresent. On the second and third questions, Melanchthon likewise appeals to the communicatio as understood by him—that is to say, to the genus idiomaticum. Glorified bodies are ‘enlivened by life, light, and justice, which the risen Son of God gives, so that he might resuscitate and vivify you’.⁴² And for Christ to be in someone in the required sense is to be understood ‘by the communicatio idiomatum’, as is ‘the presence of the Son [of God] in the preaching of the Gospel and the saints’, and ‘in the Church’.⁴³ This means simply that Christ is present since his divine nature is present, and the relevant predications are construed along the lines of CN-semantics. It seems to me that in this text Melanchthon is simply making more explicit things that are implicit in his writings from 1533 onwards. It is bitterly ironic that Melanchthon may well have been the originator of a doctrine—bodily omnipresence—that he here repudiates so strongly. He was a cautious and intelligent thinker, and (as we shall see) IBS is a novelty that is susceptible to obvious counterinstances: precisely the kind of view that it is hard to imagine Melanchthon countenancing, let alone inventing.

2.3 Brenz’s Early Christology: The Origin of the Genus Maiestaticum 2.3.1 The General Metaphysical and Semantic Principles of Brenz’s Christology Brenz’s Christology, while bearing some surface resemblance to Luther’s, follows a radically different path from his, and even more so from Melanchthon’s. Brenz was never a close part of the Wittenberg circle, and charted an independent course of his own. Unlike the authors I have considered thus far, he adopts an account that makes the hypostatic union basic, such that the relation between the natures is not explained by some prior relation. But his view has the unique merit among such theories (as far as I know) of showing how the hypostatic union can itself explain the divine person’s being the subject of Christological properties and nontrivial predicates. In this section, I begin with a sketch of the overall dynamic of

⁴² Melanchthon, En. ep. ad Col., c. 3 (CR, 15, col. 1272). ⁴³ Melanchthon, En. ep. ad Col., c. 3 (CR, 15, cols. 1271–2).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

96

 

Brenz’s view, since there is a lot to keep in mind. I provide the evidence for it here and in subsequent sections of this chapter. To grasp what is going on, we need to understand two distinct kinds of presuppositions more or less peculiar to Brenz and his circle. The first is a semantic one, albeit with a venerable tradition going back to Augustine and beyond, according to which we can aptly use ‘man’ and ‘Son of Man’ to refer not to the divine person as such, but to Christ’s human nature—which Brenz also frequently refers to by the abstract nouns ‘humanity’, ‘human nature’.⁴⁴ (We shall see numerous instances of this below.) The second is a metaphysical principle, to the effect that the communicatio requires the divine person to have human properties, and the human nature to have divine properties. We quickly get to this principle if we consider the identity of the Son of Man with the human nature, presupposed by the semantic principle just outlined. If the Son of Man has divine properties, so too must the human nature. In effect, Brenz adopts not the symmetrical account of the communicatio proposed by John of Damascus, but a version of the asymmetrical one—the human nature communicates its attributes to the divine person; the divine person communicates its (divine) attributes, some or all of them, to the human nature. I shall label this view ‘Brenzian communicatio’. Brenzian communicatio requires the human nature to possess certain divine attributes. In line with this, Brenz holds that any divine attribute possessed by the whole Christ—the person along with the human nature—must be possessed by the human nature. Here, for example, is what Brenz says about omnipresence, commenting on Mt 28:20 (‘Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age’): ‘We neither can nor should take (intelligere) “I” for the divinity alone, and make Christ a half, but we take it for the whole Christ, who is God and man.’⁴⁵ ‘The divinity’ here is clearly the divine person (the referent of ‘I’), and the idea is that if the predicate (‘omnipresent’) were not true of both the divine person and the human nature, it would not be true that Christ is omnipresent.⁴⁶ Let me label this mereological principle ‘BMP’: BMP: Any divine property φd had by the whole Christ is had by Christ’s two natures (supposing that φd is possibly had by Christ’s two natures).

⁴⁴ See e.g. Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum, c. 15, n. 30 (PL, 44, cols. 981–2), quoted in Lombard, Sent. III, d. 6, c. 2, n. 6 (II, 51). It is true that many theologians, both Medieval and Early Modern, use ‘man’ or ‘Son of Man’ to refer to Christ’s human nature. But most do so while acknowledging that the usage is improper, either directly, or implicitly by, for example, associating the communicatio with hypostasis-predication or predication in concreto. For Medieval antecedents to the issue, and some discussion of it, see my ‘Homo assumptus and the Christology of Hugh of St Victor: Some Historical and Theological Revisions’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 65 (2014), 62–77. ⁴⁵ Brenz, Sent. (in Brenz, Die christologischen Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Theodor Mahlmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981)), 142.1–4. This volume contains, along with Sent., De pers. unione and De maiest. ⁴⁶ For something like this mereological principle operative in an early seventeenth-century attempt to makes sense of Brenz’s view (that of Balthasar Meisner), see Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik, 65–70, 82–6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

97

Brenz’s initial intuition is that an unrestricted version of BMP (and of Brenzian communicatio) is true, but he increasingly comes to realize that, while there are no human properties that cannot be had by the divine person, there are some divine attributes that cannot be borne by the human nature. (I address this in sections 2.4.3 and 4.2.2.) So the account needs to include the ad hoc proviso that it obtains only in cases in which whatever is true of the whole is possibly true of the parts; and this domain becomes more restricted in scope as Brenz’s Christology develops. Brenz holds that property-possession is not just a linguistic matter; it is also ontological. Indeed, as we shall see, Brenz adopts this view on the grounds that he believes (as does Luther) that every predication of the form ‘x is φ’ must be grounded on one of the form ‘x is Φ’. The restrictions, incidentally, constitute a fatal theological flaw in the whole Brenzian project. (It creates a philosophical problem too, which I return to in the next section.) Supposing (as Brenz does) that the Son of Man and the human nature are identical, and coming to restrict the array of divine properties that can be had by the human nature, results in a restriction of the predicates that can characterize the Son of Man. If the humanity is not eternal, for example, then the Son of Man is not eternal. But this latter claim is false on the assumption of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, since according to Chalcedon, as I spelled it out above, the referents of (for example) ‘(the man) Jesus’ and ‘(the) Word’ are identical, and this means that whatever can be predicated of the one can be predicated of the other: if the one is eternal and uncreated, so is the other. The same problem affects an array of divine attributes, as we shall see.⁴⁷ I shall return to this issue on numerous occasions in the chapters that follow, since the problem was known to some of the subsequent critics of Brenz and his followers—though not, as it seems, to the Brenzians themselves. As far as I can make out, BMP is a consequence of Brenzian communicatio, and that is why Brenz accepted it. But, as we shall see, many of his opponents suppose it to be refuted in virtue of a refutation of a more general mereological principle: GMP:

Any property had by a whole is had by the parts of that whole.

GMP is obviously false, and this is exploited frequently by Brenz’s opponents. But refuting GMP is not sufficient for refuting BMP unless BMP entails GMP. And this is not at all clear: BMP follows from Brenzian communicatio independently of GMP. At any rate, BMP is quite different from Luther’s IBS. IBS is a principle about spatial inseparability, not about general requirements for the communicatio, and accepting IBS clearly does not bind one to BMP. That said, it seems plausible that ⁴⁷ As Aquinas once sagely observed, ‘A small error at the beginning is a large one at the end’ (De ente, prooem.). Brenz’s Christology is an object lesson in the problems that arise if ‘man’ is allowed, in the context of a non-Nestorian Christology, to refer systematically to Christ’s human nature.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

98

 

Brenz came to accept BMP in consequence of misunderstanding the nature of IBS as committing Luther to a general mereological principle pertinent to the communicatio as such. Brenz was, after all, fully aware of the controversy between Luther and Zwingli, and a careless reading of Luther’s attack on alloiosis—in particular his thought that the omnipresence of the human nature is required for the omnipresence of Christ—might suggest something like BMP. It is possible to spell out more explicitly the various semantic (and metaphysical) claims that Brenzian communicatio involves. But before I do this, we need to get clear on a further aspect of Brenz’s Christology. Brenz maintains, as we shall see, that in the Incarnation God and man are supposed to be in some sense the same thing—the same person. He claims that ‘the Son of God and the Son of Man are one undivided person in Jesus Christ, while the natures of God and man are diverse’ (see the text quoted in section 2.3.2, p. 104). Given that the Son of God is the divine substance or nature, and the Son of Man a human substance or nature, it follows that the Son of God and the Son of Man are the same person, but distinct natures or substances.⁴⁸ As I have already said, the union is such as to mandate that (some of) the properties of the one are properties of the other: in short such that each became the other—God became man (and man became God). And Brenz holds that there is just one subject of attributes in the Incarnation (other than, it turn out, in cases in which the attribute is not possibly borne by the human nature): ‘there are not two Christs, but is only one Christ. Therefore there is one infinite thing, and one immense thing’—namely, Christ the one person, both Son of God and Son of Man.⁴⁹ Notions of union falling short sameness do not seem to capture these various desiderata: it is, for example, not true of the items in an accidental unity or hylomorphic compound that each becomes the other, or that each one has the properties of the other. But if the notion of union here requires some sort of sameness, it cannot require absolute identity. The two constituents are subject to distinct (trivial and nontrivial) predications—and this is what it is to be non-identical.⁵⁰ The Son of God communicates divine properties to the Son of Man, and receives human properties from the Son of Man; and the Son of Man communicates human properties to the Son of God, and receives divine properties from the Son of God. And as we shall see the properties are possessed in different ways by these two subjects. Furthermore, as will become apparent, the Son of Man is assumed; the Son of God assumes. So God and man in the Christological case differ in trivial properties. And, as just mentioned, Brenz later comes to claim that they differ in non-trivial properties too, since as I shall show he holds that some divine ⁴⁸ For the ‘substance’ terminology, see section 2.4.3, p. 111. ⁴⁹ Brenz, De pers. unione (in Brenz, Die christologische Schriften), 22.31–3. ⁵⁰ On this, see section 0.1, p. 2.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

99

attributes (e.g. being uncreated) cannot be communicated to the human nature. Thus it is true, given Brenzian communicatio, that the Son of God is uncreated, but not true that the Son of Man is, or that Christ is—examples of the exclusions specified in Brenzian communicatio and BMP. We thus have, in short, two parallel (non-identical) subjects—the divine person, the human nature, differing in both trivial and some non-trivial predicates—somehow constituting one and the same person. So in effect Brenz seems to be committed to some kind of relative identity, according to which certain kinds of sameness relation are relativized to given sortals. The Son of God and the Son of Man are one person (referred to as ‘Christ’), and two natures. We might therefore helpfully think of Brenz’s target notion of union as a kind of sameness falling short of identity: God and man are the same without being absolutely identical, and I shall use ‘same*’ to pick out this variety of sameness (while acknowledging that there is no theory of sameness* in Brenz’s work, and that Brenz’s notions of union and unity are merely intuitive, and wholly pre-theoretical). The God and man are the same* person but not the same* nature. What is lacking is an account of how the Son of God and the Son of Man get to be the same* person. This gap is something that Brenz himself was aware of, and in the final stage of his Christological development tried to plug, as I shall show in Chapter 4. (Balthasar Meisner (1587–1626), writing in the second decade of the seventeenth century, characterized Brenzian views as positing ‘essential difference’ and ‘existential sameness (identitas)’ in Christ: a reading that I take to be close to what I am proposing here.)⁵¹ Given this, we can spell out the semantics of various Christological predications as Brenz understands the issues. Let me start with predications ‘in natural matter’. Here the basic claim is that God and man are the same* without being identical, so we can lay out the fundamental semantic claim like this: BS-semantics: ‘God is man’ =def ‘the Son of God and the Son of Man are the same* person’. (‘BS-semantics’ for ‘Brenz’s sameness* semantics’.) Note that this in effect identifies the hypostatic union as the sameness* relation that obtains between the Son of God and the Son of Man, since the Son of God and the Son of Man are one person and two natures. The sameness* relation is the union of the natures. Brenzian communicatio means that a predication the subject of which is something identical with the divine person requires a radically different treatment from a predication the subject of which is something identical with the human nature. Basically, the former kind of predication involves the divine person

⁵¹ See Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik, 81–2.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

100

 

bearing a Porphyrian proprium or accident. And this bearing relationship presupposes that God and man are the same* person. So: BH-semantics: ‘the Son of God is φp’ =def ‘the divine person p bears Φp-ness’; and p bears Φp-ness iff (the human nature h bears Φp-ness, and h is the same* person as p). (‘BH-semantics’ for ‘Brenz’s hypostasis semantics’.) The first conjunct on the right of the bi-conditional expresses the relevant component of Brenzian communicatio, and the second conjunct the hypostatic union as understood by Brenz. The latter kind of predication requires the human nature to bear divine attributes. And, again, this bearing relationship presupposes that God and man are the same* person. This gives the following principle (I use ‘Φd’ here and below to signify a divine attribute): BGM-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the human nature h bears Φdness’; and h bears Φd-ness iff h is the same* person as the divine person. (‘BGM-semantics’ for ‘Brenz’s semantics of the genus maiestaticum’.) Note that BGM-semantics does not require that every divine attribute is predicable of the Son of Man; only those attributes that can be borne by the human nature are predicable of the Son of Man. But like Luther, Brenz makes fundamentality a requirement. Brenz’s position diverges sharply from that of Luther, and a comparison of Brenz’s views on the signification of ‘man’ with those of both Luther and Ockham forms a highly instructive contrast. As we saw in section 1.1.1.2, pp. 43–5, for Ockham ‘man’ signifies human nature but connotes the person; for Luther, ‘man’ signifies the human person. For both thinkers, these views on the signification of ‘man’ mean that the term supposits (personally) for the person: in standard contexts, one identical with the human nature; in Christological contexts, one identical with the divine person. For Brenz, ‘man’ signifies human nature, and in both Christological and non-Christological contexts refers to a composite of body and soul – a person in non-Christological contexts, and the human nature in Christological contexts. These semantic choices vividly manifest the profound metaphysical differences in between the Christologies of Ockham and Luther, on the one hand, and Brenz, on the other. And hence, also, the absence of any salient concrete/abstract distinction in Brenz’s Christology. (On occasion below, when it is necessary to be completely clear, I shall talk of the genus maiestaticumB, the genus maiestaticum construed on the assumption that the human nature is identical with the Son of Man. When my comments apply to the genus maiestaticum on either this understanding or one that would deny this characteristic Brenzian identification, I simply talk of the genus maiestaticum.) Brenz’s Christology is profoundly Alexandrian, in the sense that it makes human nature’s participation in divine attributes central to the hypostatic union. Given this, it may seem very odd to find Brenz talking about the human

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

101

nature as an ‘(assumed) man’, or ‘the Son of Man’—something that is typically associated with Antiochene traditions, ultimately leading to the two-person (Word–man; Logos–anthrōpos) Christologies that are associated with Nestorius and others. The trick is to keep in mind that Brenz supposes that the Word and the man constitute one person (they are the same* person); the man is not in himself a person, and not something that depends on a person in anything like the way supposed in the supposital-union theory. Brenz’s Christology falls roughly into four stages. In the first, he accepts a strong account of the Exaltation of Christ’s human nature, but states none of the distinctive Christological claims just outlined. The second stage extends the account of Christ’s majesty to his earthly life too, and asserts Brenzian communicatio on the basis of the hypostatic union.⁵² In the third, Brenz, while still holding essentially the same theory, begins to offer more precise answers to the theoretical questions that the genus maiestaticum raises (e.g. how the divine attributes are possessed, and which these attributes are: in effect, restricting the range of communicated attributes, and doing so, as far as I can tell, in reaction to the Christology of Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1560), which I examine briefly in section 2.5). In the fourth and final phase of his Christological thinking, Brenz comes to conceptualize the hypostatic union as the presence or perichoretic communion of the two natures, and sees that the genus maiestaticumB can provide a way of accounting for this communion relation. He thus begins to plug the explanatory gap in his thinking that I identified above. I deal with the first two stages in sections 2.3.2 and 2.3.3, with the third in section 2.4.3, and with the fourth in section 4.2.⁵³

2.3.2 Brenz’s Early Christology Brenz’s earliest systematic reflections on the Christological questions that are of relevance to my discussion can be found in the first edition of his commentary on John’s Gospel, published in 1527. Here is what Brenz has to say about the Session at the right hand of the Father, understood merely as Christ’s Exaltation: To sit at the right hand of the Father is not to sit, in some corporeal way, close to the Father . . . but it is to occupy a kingdom as extensive as that which the Father occupies; it is to be of the same (eiusdem) power, wisdom, and majesty as God the Father. For Christ, after he rose from the dead, reigns where the Father reigns, that is to say, everywhere, whether in Heaven, in earth, in the sea, in death, in Hell, not only as God, but truly also as man.⁵⁴ ⁵² For a summary of Brenz’s views, see Table 2 and Table 3. ⁵³ For Brenz’s later Christology, see Hans Christian Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 93 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991). Still useful on the whole range of Brenz’s Christology is Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 44–92, 125–204. ⁵⁴ Brenz, In divi Ioannis evangelion . . . exegesis (Hagenau, 1527), fols. 353v–4r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

102

 

There is no mention here, or elsewhere in the text, of a link between the Incarnation and the genus maiestaticum, though there clearly is a very strong doctrine of the Exaltation of the human nature, according to which ‘Christ . . . reigns everywhere . . . as man’. Just how much ontological import we should give to this communication is not clear to me: whether or not, for example, we should construe ‘power, wisdom, and majesty’ as the ipsissima divine attributes. While these attributes are ‘the same . . . as’ those of ‘God the Father’, the justification Brenz offers speaks in terms of reign, not of a power to create and sustain creatures. Brenz goes on to make it clear that he understands the claims to entail some kind of omnipresence: Christ reigns everywhere, and he does this by being ‘widely . . . spread out (late . . . diffusus est), so to speak’; where the context makes it clear that what Brenz again means is Christ ‘as man’.⁵⁵ So here we have something like the view of the Exaltation that we find in the pre-1528 Luther. It is possible, however, to determine very precisely when Brenz first came to formulate his distinctive account of the hypostatic union—as ipso facto requiring the genus maiestaticum. In the second edition of the commentary on John, published in 1529, Brenz makes various small but important additions not found in the earlier text. Here is one germane to our purposes, part of which I have already quoted: For because there was made a true incarnation—that is, because God and man came together (convenissent) truly in one person—[how could this be] if the one did not communicate to the other its goods? Christ, not only as God but also as man, was, from the beginning of his Incarnation, of the same glory, majesty, and authority as God. But in the time of his flesh the man Christ hid (dissimulavit) this equality, and even emptied himself from this genuine majesty, and was found in form as a man—that is, he was truly liable to corporeal affections, pains, passions, and to death, so that he might redeem us from death. But after the Resurrection, through the Ascension, nothing new was added to the man Christ, but what he possessed from the beginning of the Incarnation was revealed by the Resurrection, Ascension, and the Mission of the Holy Spirit.⁵⁶

‘Man’ here cannot refer straightforwardly to the divine person (as we would expect it to on standard accounts of Christological predication), because there is no sense in which the divine person ‘came together’ with himself to constitute a person. ‘Man’, and ‘Christ . . . as man’, refer to the human nature, and given this, the communication of the goods between God and man requires Brenzian communicatio. Furthermore, there is no thought that the communicatio should be construed as restricted in any way: all divine properties (‘goods’) are communicated

⁵⁵ Brenz, In ioann. (1527), fol. 354r. ⁵⁶ Brenz, In divi Ioannis evangelion . . . exegesis (Hagenau, 1529), fol. 244v, quoted in Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 128.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

103

to the man, and all human properties to the divine person. This communication is a consequence not of the Exaltation but of the Incarnation. Moreover, the text understands the communicatio to be an ontological matter, not merely a linguistic one. Seeing the human nature as the subject of divine attributes raises acutely the problem of the distinction between Christ’s earthly life and the Exaltation, and the rest of the text deals with this in terms of ‘hiding’ the majesty. ‘The man Christ’ refers to the human nature: it is the human nature’s glory that is hidden. The claim is that the assumed nature has ‘the same glory, majesty, and authority as God’. Talk of ‘kenosis’ here—he ‘emptied himself from this genuine majesty’—should not be construed as meaning that Christ’s human nature lacked the relevant divine properties. As the text makes clear, kenosis consists merely in being ‘truly liable to corporeal affections, pains, passions, and to death’; the possession of these attributes is presumably consistent with the nature’s possessing divine majesty. What is not evident here is whether or not the relevant powers were not merely possessed but also non-episodically used during Christ’s earthly life. BGMsemantics, if this represents Brenz’s thinking at this stage in his career, would make the possession of the attribute, even in the absence of its exercise, sufficient for predication; and during Christ’s earthly life the hiding of the majesty could consist in the non-use of the relevant powers. As we shall see, Brenz later comes to affirm explicitly that predication requires both power-possession and powerexercise, and makes both of these necessary consequences of the Incarnation. On this later view, the hiding of the majesty consists not in the hiding of the power (by non-exercise), but the hiding of the exercise of the power. The text just quoted does not say enough for us to be able to determine which view the early Brenz would hold. Either view of Christ’s earthly life, incidentally would constitute a strikingly novel one, distinctively Lutheran—albeit not one found in Luther himself. Compare Aquinas’s treatment of the crucial kenotic passage (Phil. 2:7): ‘Just as he [viz. the divine person] descended from Heaven (not that he ceased to be in Heaven, but because he began newly to be on earth), so he emptied himself (se exinanivit), not by laying aside his divine nature, but by assuming a human nature.’⁵⁷ Here the kenosis simply consists in becoming incarnate: it is something that happens to the divine person, not his human nature, and whatever supernatural gifts the human nature possesses are created, not uncreated. I noted in section 1.2.1.1, pp. 60–1, that Luther first comes to associate omnipresence with incarnation (as opposed to exaltation) in his 1528 treatise Vom Abendmahl. Brenz’s move, linking the communicated attributes to the Incarnation rather than the Exaltation, is highly analogous to this, and occurred

⁵⁷ Aquinas, Super epistolam B. Pauli ad Philipenses lectura, c. 2, l. 1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

104

 

no more than a few months after the publication of Luther’s treatise. The conclusion that Brenz came to his view under the influence of Luther (or perhaps even of Melanchthon, if Brenz knew of his position at this time) is almost irresistible—even if in taking his view Brenz moves well beyond anything Luther himself claimed in terms of the identity of the communicated attributes, and applies Luther’s basic insight in the context of a radically different Christological model. If this is so, his reading of Luther is rather similar to that which we find in Zwingli, seeing Luther’s SG-possession in terms of the communication of divine attributes. Another passage, part of Brenz’s commentary on Luke’s Gospel dating from 1537, makes similar claims about the communicatio: Because the Son of God and the Son of Man are one undivided person in Jesus Christ, while the natures of God and man are diverse, nevertheless the works of the natures are common to the whole person, so that, just as the Son of God creates, so also does the Son of Man, and as the Son of God gives life, justifies, and saves, so also does the Son of Man; and, conversely, the Son of God is, on account of the unity of person which he has with the Son of Man, made to be hungry, thirsty, ignorant, passible, and mortal.⁵⁸

We could read this along standard Chalcedonian lines, taking ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Man’ to have identical referents—viz. the divine person. But we should rather, I think, read it in accordance with Brenz’s understanding of the hypostatic union found in the second edition of the commentary on John, just discussed. As we shall see, it is this understanding that Brenz persistently adheres to in all subsequent works, and we should not want to ascribe inconsistency to him unless we have to. So if we read the text in this way, we see that the divine person communicates his power to create (and to give life, to justify, and to save) to the human nature, the Son of Man; the assumed nature communicates its properties to the divine person, the Son of God: Brenz’s Christology in a nutshell. The ‘natures are diverse’, but ‘because’ of the union of ‘the Son of God’—the divine person—and ‘the Son of Man’—the human nature—what is ascribed to the ‘person in Jesus Christ’ is ascribed to the Son of Man too. The two passages just quoted illustrate all the points covered by BS-semantics, BH-semantics, and BGM-semantics, as can be seen by reading the texts in the light of these various principles. (For the sake of space, I leave this task to the reader.) If we read these texts together, we can also see that Brenz accepts an explanatory two-stage UC-ordering: (sameness* of person → (hypostasis-as-subject + genus idiomaticumB)).⁵⁹ Thus, the passage from the second edition of the commentary ⁵⁸ Brenz, In Evangelion quod inscribitur secundum Lucam, duodecim priora capita homiliae (in Brenz, Opera omnia, V (Tübingen, 1582), 579), again quoted in Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 128. ⁵⁹ Understanding ‘sameness* of person’ here and below to signify a Brenzian relative-identity way of understanding the hypostatic union of the natures.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

105

on John makes it clear that all divine and human properties are communicated, and the passage from the commentary on Luke makes it clear that this communication is a necessary consequence of the union of natures. Unlike the apparent explanatory lacuna in the soul–body model, the communicatio, in Brenz’s theory, is explained by the hypostatic union. After all, if Brenz is committed to relative identity, then what we learn from his claim, outlined above, that there is just one subject of properties in Christ is that when we count non-trivial property-bearers, we count persons, not natures. So if God and man are the same* person, it follows that any (non-trivial) property had by one is had by the other (other than in cases in which the property is not possibly borne by the human nature). The two natures bring their properties along with them, so to speak; if the two natures are the same* person, then that person has the properties of the natures. Rather elegantly, then, given Brenz’s semantic principles, the metaphysical relation at each of these stages grounds the corresponding linguistic predication. And it looks as though the divine person bears his human properties (and the human nature its divine properties) immediately, not by piggybacking, since the divine person is the same* person as the bearer of the property—the nature.⁶⁰ So here we have an account of the arrow in Brenz’s explanatory two-stage UCordering. What remains unexplained or simply basic is how it is that the natures are united, or what it is for them to be the same* person. As we shall see, the final stage of Brenz’s Christology provides a way to show how, without appeal to the supposital-union theory, the union of natures could obtain.

2.3.3 Brenz and the Stuttgart Colloquy with Lasco Significant portions of Brenz’s Christology were formulated in the context of a series of controversies between himself and various Reformed theologians. In line with my ‘snapshot’ methodology here, then, I outline some of the controversies and use them to show the ways in which Brenz becomes clearer in his fundamental Christological orientations. Among other things, Brenz becomes more explicit that the communicated attributes are divine attributes, infinite in perfection.⁶¹ One such controversy took place in 1556. On 22 May of that year Brenz and John a Lasco (1499–1560) met at Stuttgart to discuss Eucharistic doctrine, and in the course of the discussion the Christological issues which lie at the core of the dispute arose.⁶² Of the documents relevant to the colloquy, the most detailed and ⁶⁰ For a summary of Brenz’s views on UC-ordering, see Table 1. ⁶¹ For the chronology of the works I discuss in the remainder of this chapter, see Brandy, Die späte Christologie, 69. ⁶² I briefly discuss what is in effect the background to this dispute—the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549—at the beginning of the next chapter.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

106

 

specific, from a doctrinal point of view, are Lasco’s initial statement of a broadly Calvinist position (a response to Lutheran and Brenzian claims about the Eucharist), and Brenz’s report of the colloquy itself.⁶³ (There is a report from Lasco, but it is less detailed on the arguments.) In his position document, Lasco notes that it is against the nature of a body to be omnipresent,⁶⁴ and that in any case, if Christ’s body were omnipresent, then it would not be the same body as that which he had on earth—and thus would be of no avail for Eucharistic purposes.⁶⁵ Lasco affirms Calvin’s views (which I discuss in the next chapter) about the life-giving nature of Christ’s body⁶⁶ and its action at a distance.⁶⁷ Brenz’s report of the colloquy offers two arguments pertinent to his acceptance of the genus maiestaticum—one on omnipresence, one on omnipotence. He argues that the hypostatic union requires the two-way spatial inseparability of the natures (though does not say enough to know whether he grounds the conclusion on Luther’s IBS or his own BMP),⁶⁸ and, in response to Lasco’s claim that it is against the nature of a body to be thus omnipresent, adds some important clarifications on the relation between omnipresence and the human nature: This reply is set aside in this way, that each nature, divinity and humanity, preserves its property of substance, but not [its property] of accidents. For the substance of the divinity is not changed into the substance of the humanity, or vice versa. But the accidents of the humanity are changed, and the humanity of Christ is adorned with the properties of conditions of the divinity. But to be in a place is an accident of the body. Therefore a body, while remaining a corporeal substance, can be, by divine power, not just in one place but in many at the same time.⁶⁹

Strictly speaking, this text does not affirm omnipresence, but as we have seen Brenz affirms omnipresence as early as 1527. So here, Brenz offers two very significant elucidations, the second of which he subjects to considerable development in the years that follow. The first is that the human nature retains its essential properties, but that its spatial location is merely an accident, and thus not a feature necessary for being a human nature. The second is that the relevant divine property—being omnipresent—is something, like an accident, with which the body is ‘adorned’; it is borne by the nature in a way akin to that in which a bodily accident is. Indeed, on one possible reading this passage asserts that the divine attribute is simply speaking an accident of the human nature (‘the accidents of the humanity are changed’, and among the accidents received are ‘the properties and conditions of the divinity’). I have thus far been presupposing something ⁶³ ⁶⁴ ⁶⁶ ⁶⁸

The material can be found in Calvin, Epistolae, nos. 2459–2464 (CR, 44, cols. 150–69). Lasco, Decl. de coena, CR, 44, cols. 152–3. ⁶⁵ Lasco, Decl. de coena, CR, 44, col. 153. Lasco, Decl. de coena, CR, 44, cols. 151–2. ⁶⁷ Lasco, Decl. de coena, CR, 44, col. 154. Brenz, Acta Stutt., CR, 44, col. 161. ⁶⁹ Brenz, Acta Stutt., CR, 44, col. 162.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

107

like this because of Brenz’s communication language, but the talk of accidents seems to make the issue more explicit. Brenz does not say much more about the nature of the relevant bearing relation, however—for example, whether or not it might involve inherence. Here is the argument about omnipotence: Wherever the right hand of God is, there also is Christ in his humanity, that is, with his body and blood. For the article of faith has this: ‘He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the omnipotent Father.’ But the right hand of the omnipotent God is in the bread of the Lord’s Supper. Therefore also Christ is there, along with his body and blood. But by ‘the right hand of God’ there should be understood the majesty and omnipotence of God. . . . Even if ‘the right hand of God’ does not only signify omnipotence but also heavenly felicity, nevertheless it is manifestly false that the man in Christ, in unity of person, is not omnipotent, since the article of faith is clear: he sits at the right hand of the Father, that is, the man in Christ is made to be of the same majesty and omnipotence with God the Father: Ephesians 1, Philippians 1, Hebrews 1.⁷⁰

The reasoning is relatively straightforward: unity of person requires ‘the man in Christ’ (= Christ’s humanity, or ‘his body and blood’—by synecdoche, I assume) to bear divine properties, and so requires the humanity to do so too. And Christ’s humanity is at the right hand of the Father; given that the right hand of the Father is omnipotent (so that anything at the right hand of the Father is omnipotent), it follows that Christ’s humanity is ‘omnipotent’ (‘the man in Christ is made to be of the same majesty and omnipotence with God the Father’): in all, a very characteristic example of Brenzian communicatio. If we read this argument in the light of the first one, the following picture would emerge: being omnipotent is borne by Christ’s human nature, just as ‘being in [many] places at the same time’ is borne by the nature.

2.4 Brenz’s Christology in 1561: Refining the Genus Maiestaticum Brenz’s more developed discussion takes as its starting point a set of objections to Luther’s Christology outlined by Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75), the leader of the Church in Zurich after Zwingli’s death, in his 1556 Apologetica expositio. So I briefly present Bullinger’s objections first, and then return to the exposition of Brenz’s views. The texts I consider in this section—Brenz’s De personali unione and Sententia (dating from Spring and Summer 1561, respectively)—and in ⁷⁰ Brenz, Acta Stutt., CR, 44, col. 162. For an affirmation of omnipotence in a sermon from the same year, see Brenz, Von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des Altares: Drey Predig (Frankfurt, 1556), 13–14.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

108

 

Chapter 4 below—De maiestate (1562) and Recognitio (1564)—are strictly Christological treatises, and Brenz develops his views in far more detail there than in the works discussed thus far.

2.4.1 Bullinger’s Anti-Lutheran Arguments Bullinger’s Apologetica expositio (1556) does not offer any account of the metaphysics of the hypostatic union. But Bullinger provides a summary of Chalcedonian teaching that makes clear his acceptance of the Chalcedonian claim that the second person of the Trinity is the same person as Christ: ‘God, remaining changeless, assumed a man or a human nature’, so that these diverse natures—the divinity and humanity—are conjoined and united in one inseparable person, such that, however, the properties exist and remain inviolate in unity of person, and are not destroyed, or obliterated, or confused to the extent that one nature is constituted of the two.⁷¹

Bullinger identifies two areas of disagreement between himself and his Lutheran opponents, one metaphysical, one semantic. The metaphysical issue is bodily omnipresence, and Bullinger uses two strategies in response: first, no body can be omnipresent; and, secondly, given this, lack of omnipresence does not threaten the other instances of SG-possession—in particular, its life-giving property. On the first, Bullinger claims that it simply is not possible for a body to extend itself through the universe.⁷² He does not mention non-spatial presence. Presumably he would regard this as even less compatible with the conditions of materiality. On the second, Bullinger accepts that Christ’s flesh is life-giving⁷³ (just as it becomes immortal and impassible after the Resurrection).⁷⁴ But he does not believe that the life-giving quality of the flesh requires two-way spatial inseparability, for the reason that the life-giving quality of the flesh is not a matter of presence at all. The case he has in mind is, of course, the Eucharist, which Bullinger claims to construe in Zwinglian manner—though as we shall see in the next chapter, confessing the life-giving quality of the flesh places him closer to Calvin.⁷⁵ Bullinger treats the semantic issue with a little more circumspection, simply giving what he takes to be the orthodox view without expressly contrasting it with the Lutheran one. Following Zwingli, he refers to the communicatio idiomatum as

⁷¹ Bullinger, Apologetica expositio (Zurich, 1556), 57. ⁷² Bullinger, Apol. exp., 39. ⁷³ Bullinger, Apol. exp., 94. ⁷⁴ Bullinger, Apol. exp., 78–9. ⁷⁵ Bullinger claims that the life-giving Holy Spirit gives to us the life of the flesh by believing and participating in the Eucharist (Apol. exp., 19). At Apol. exp., 21–4, Bullinger gives a long catena of quotations and citations from Zwingli, none of which evidently supports the view that Bullinger himself defends.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

109

alloiosis, and understands it merely in terms of CN-semantics—thereby notably simplifying Zwingli’s account (by omitting type-one alloiosis altogether).⁷⁶ In any case, as we have already seen, Bullinger holds that Christ’s flesh is life-giving: so he does not accept Zwingli’s claims about type-one alloiosis—or certainly, does not accept them globally. Bullinger observes that CN-semantics is affirmed by Cyril of Alexandria, and quotes CN: We claim, he [viz. Cyril] says, that he [viz. the Word of God] suffered and died in this way, not because God the Word suffered in his own nature . . . for God is incorporeal and outside the suffering, but because the body that was made his own sustained this, for which reason he is said to have suffered all this for us. For God, who could not suffer, was in the body that suffered.⁷⁷

As we have seen, Brenz rejects one of the fundamental assumptions of CN-semantics—namely, that the divine person does not bear any human properties. And he offers a reading of CN in line with his own semantic commitments, as I shall show.

2.4.2 Brenz on the Semantics of the Genus Idiomaticum Bullinger’s two objections together cover much of the ground between himself and Luther: CN-semantics and the impossibility of bodily omnipresence. Brenz’s response—set out in terms of his own more complex theorizing—occurs in De personali unione and Sententia. I treat these two works together because their fundamental teaching is the same. In both works, Brenz is silent about the supposital union—something that he considers and rejects a year later, in 1562 (the topic of section 4.2.1). Rather, on the question of the hypostatic union, he cites the creed of Chalcedon, and then mentions the soul–body analogy; though his use of this analogy is not really to specify the metaphysics, but only as a rather awkward illustration of the inseparability of natures in Christ.⁷⁸ Bullinger’s quoting CN forces Brenz to confront semantic issues explicitly, which he here undertakes as a necessary antecedent (as he sees it) to the discussion of metaphysical matters.⁷⁹ He takes as his starting point his opponents’ failure to affirm bodily omnipresence: ‘when they say that the person of Christ does not have his humanity united to him everywhere, they seem to affirm in Christ merely a verbal communication, not a real one’.⁸⁰ He contrasts these theologians with the ‘old (veteres) [theologians], who indeed taught rightly, as far as I [viz. Brenz] ⁷⁶ Bullinger, Apol. exp., 58. ⁷⁷ Bullinger, Apol. exp., 63. ⁷⁸ See Brenz, De pers. unione, 16.19–34. He notes: ‘It is signified by this likeness that, just as in a human being, for as long as they exist and remain a human being, the flesh and soul cannot be separated, so in Christ God and man cannot be divided from each other’ (Brenz, De pers. unione, 16.31–4). ⁷⁹ Brenz, De pers. unione, 32.13. ⁸⁰ Brenz, De pers. unione, 32.20–3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

110

 

can judge’.⁸¹ The idea is that denying the truth of predications in the genus maiestaticum entails denying the truth of predications in the genus idiomaticum. Thus, given BMP, if the humanity does not bear omnipresence, Christ is not omnipresent; so, by parity of reasoning, if the divine person does not bear (e.g.) suffering, it is not true that Christ suffers. Here we have a realf communication, and thus a realf predication, along with the assumption that there are no realt predications in the absence of a correlative realf predication. The argument shows very nicely the various peculiarities of Brenz’s position: both the conditionals just stated make use of the fundamentality requirement, and their conjunction presupposes Brenzian communicatio. Brenz responds to Bullinger’s appeal to text such as CN by offering an exegesis in line with his own view. Here is a Cyrilline text quoted for the purposes of commentary: ‘Suffering in the economy’, Cyril again says, ‘was thus: because of their ineffable union the Word called its own things that belong to its own flesh, while remaining outside the suffering as it pertains to its own nature. For God cannot suffer. This is no surprise since we also see that, when some suffering befalls a man’s body, his soul in its nature remains outside the suffering, but the soul is understood not to be outside the suffering since its own body suffers.’⁸²

Brenz comments: God the Word suffered, as Cyril says, ‘impassibly’ and immortally, not so that he might be said in an empty (vano) word to suffer and die; rather he also truly and in reality (vere et re ipsa) suffers and dies, not from the nature of the deity (ex natura deitatis) but from the nature of the humanity (ex natura humanitatis).⁸³

The contrast between ‘an empty word’ and ‘truly and reality’ is a contrast between a semantics that supposes human properties are not borne by the divine person, and one that supposes that they are. So, as Brenz reads texts such as CN, suffering and death are borne by the divine person, and were they not so, the relevant propositions would be false. This is more than merely a linguistic matter: in virtue of the humanity God the Word ‘truly and in reality’ suffers and dies—where the operative sense is realf. The obvious difficulty that Cyril’s text raises for Brenz is its apparent claim that predication does not require bearing. Brenz offers an interpretation: Cyril’s thought is not that the divine person does not bear the relevant human properties, but merely that the divine nature does not do so.

⁸¹ Brenz, De pers. unione, 32.19–20. ⁸² Brenz, De pers. unione, 34.7–15, quoting Cyril, Scholia de incarnatione unigeniti, c. 28 (PG 75, 1405A; translation from Vermigli, Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura (Zurich, 1561), trans. John Patrick Donnelly, Peter Martyr Library, series 1, vol. 2 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1995), 61, where the same text is quoted (see Vermigli, Dial., fol. 35v)). ⁸³ Brenz, De pers. unione, 34.3–7.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

111

2.4.3 Brenz on the Metaphysics of the Genus Maiestaticum Brenz, in the works here under discussion, begins to restrict the scope of the genus maiestaticum. Thus, he claims that in addition to being omnipresent, the nature is adorable and life-giving,⁸⁴ and has infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and justice,⁸⁵ and all peace and joy.⁸⁶ But he expressly eliminates certain attributes that he thinks the human nature cannot exhibit: for example, beginninglessness,⁸⁷ or being uncreated.⁸⁸ Brenz reasons that we need to make these exclusions to avoid the claim that the human nature is changed into the deity: Just as there is in Christ the divine substance, which is an uncreated spirit from eternity, so there is also a human substance, which is corporeal and which was not from eternity, but is created. Therefore in the hypostatic union, the deity, which is an uncreated spirit from eternity, was never changed into the humanity, which is a corporeal created substance; neither was the humanity ever changed into the deity.⁸⁹

We might contrast the 1537 text from the commentary on Luke’s Gospel, quoted in the previous section, according to which the power to create is communicated to the Son of Man. In the text quoted here, being created is expressly contrasted with being the creator, and only the former is affirmed of the human nature. The unnamed motivation for this shift is Schwenckfeld’s Christology, which I discuss in section 2.5. Of course, the restriction undermines the motivation for Brenzian communicatio in the first place—namely, to show how any and all divine properties can be predicated of the Son of Man. For it turns out that some of them cannot be. In these 1561 treatises, Brenz repeats his view on the identity of the relevant attributes (they are ‘infinite’, and thus I assume divine), and on their relation to the human nature: as he puts it, the ‘properties’—the ‘idiomata’—that are communicated are ‘not just properties of words but also of things’,⁹⁰ and divine properties ‘are predicated not just by empty words, but also truly and in reality (vere et re ipsa) of the flesh of Christ’—where the operative sense is again realf.⁹¹ So these divine properties are in some sense metaphysically borne by the human nature, as presupposed in BGM-semantics. At one point, Brenz likens them to accidents of the human nature: ‘nothing prevents what belongs to one substance per se from belonging to the other per accidens, as the dialecticians [viz. the

⁸⁴ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁸ ⁹⁰ ⁹¹

Brenz, De pers. unione, 34.18–23, 40.29–42.5. ⁸⁵ Brenz, De pers. unione, 24.1–5. Brenz, De pers. unione, 64.15–17. ⁸⁷ Brenz, De pers. unione, 22.27–9. Brenz, De pers. unione, 14.27–8, 26.29–30. ⁸⁹ Brenz, De pers. unione, 26.28–30.1. Brenz, De pers. unione, 32.29–30. Brenz, De pers. unione, 34.16–17; see too De pers. unione, 42.15.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

112

 

Schoolmen] say’.⁹² ‘Per accidens’ can have both theory-neutral senses (e.g. ‘contingently’) and theory-laden senses (e.g. ‘as an inherent accident’). So at the very least it looks as though Brenz is again committed here both to the view that the ipsissima divine attributes are communicated, and that they are in some sense contingent properties of the human nature (one of the ‘substances’ he is talking about).⁹³ Again, being a property ‘not just of words but also of things’ need not be interpreted in terms of a theory of inherence, but Brenz is evidently signalling some kind of metaphysical bearing relation. Brenz uses the fact that the divine person and the human nature are the same* person to show why the communication of divine attributes to the human nature does not involve any doubling of attributes, according to which the divine person would bear the divine attribute, and the human nature some replica divine attribute: Should we not say that the infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and justice are two? Supposing we are speaking of nature, then there is certainly indeed only one infinitely powerful, wise, good and just thing, which is God himself. But if we are speaking of grace, then certainly it cannot be brought about that the Son of God does not pour out his majesty onto the Son of Man, whom he has assumed into unity of person by the hypostatic union, through his inscrutable counsel and gratuitous clemency, so that what he is per se and by nature, the other is per accidens, that is, through an alien benefit and grace, on account of the hypostatic union.⁹⁴

The text shows clearly Brenz’s asymmetrical understanding of the communicatio, from God to the Son of Man (or human nature), and from the human nature (or Son of Man) to God. Divine attributes are in some sense borne by the human nature; but we should count just one power, one wisdom, and one justice, variously related to what bears them (i.e. essentially or accidentally, ‘through an alien benefit’). And I quoted in my introduction to Brenz’s Christology a passage in which Brenz is explicit that if we count what is characterized, we should count just one: ‘there are not two Christs, but is only one Christ. Therefore there is one infinite thing, and one immense thing.’ This is a result of his view that the divine person and the human nature in some sense constitute one person—they are, as I suggested above, the same* person (‘there is one . . . thing’), and they bear some of the same non-trivial properties. (Here, they are not identical since the divine majesty is poured out not onto the Son of God but onto the Son of Man, and the Son of God has them per se while the Son of Man has them per accidens.)

⁹² Brenz, De pers. unione, 22.35–6. ⁹³ For the natures as substances, see too Brenz, De pers. unione, 26.28–30. ⁹⁴ Brenz, De pers. unione, 24.9–19.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

113

So here Brenz has made some real progress in showing how the hypostatic union—the sameness* of person—can ground hypostasis-predication. But, sadly, the restrictions in BMP, and on the predication of divine attributes of the Son of Man, in effect undermine all of this, since the restrictions are incompatible with the view that when we count bearers of non-trivial properties we count persons, not natures. The attempt to avoid Schwenckfeldianism constitutes, in effect, a further problem for Brenzian communicatio, a philosophical one that is probably intractable. As I have noted above, Brenz appeals to BMP in favour of bodily omnipresence. If the whole Christ has a given divine property—in this case, omnipresence—it follows that the man Christ (i.e. the human nature) has that property too. So it is no surprise to find Brenz rejecting a claim to the contrary from Lombard that (as we shall see in section 3.2.3, p. 134) Calvin appeals to against Luther’s IBS principle: Peter Lombard says: ‘Christ is whole (totus) wherever he is, but not wholly (totum)’. This is false, if you have understood Christ to be somewhere where he does not have his humanity with him, united in a personal and heavenly manner, for in this way the person has been divided. But it is true if you understand it through what Thomas Aquinas says: ‘The person of Christ’, he says, ‘is whole (tota) in each place, but not wholly (totaliter) because he is circumscribed by no place’. And it is true that ‘Christ is not wholly (totum)’ everywhere, if by ‘wholly’ you understand the corporeal and visible mass (molem) of the body, and other external circumstances of a body.⁹⁵

Lombard’s perfectly sensible idea is that the presence of a whole at a given place does not require that all the parts of that whole are present at that same place. A part could be at a part of the place, for example, without being at the whole place. Given that location is subject to BMP, Brenz is bound to reject Lombard’s claim—as indeed he does. The whole person—the two substances that are the same* person—bears divine properties; it would not be possible for something the same* as the divine person to lack every divine property.⁹⁶ (This is the closest Brenz comes to affirming GMP.) ⁹⁵ Brenz, De pers. unione, 46.17–25, referring to Lombard, Sent. III, d. 22, c. 3, nn. 1–2 (II, 138–9), and Aquinas, ST III, q. 52, a. 3 ad 3. ⁹⁶ The appeal to Aquinas rests on a rather selective reading, incidentally. Aquinas’s view in the text mentioned is that the person of Christ is everywhere—he exists repletively, to borrow the later terminology—and that we should say something exists ‘wholly’ at a place only if it lacks presence outside that place. Since lacking presence outside a place applies only to items that exist circumscriptively or definitively at that place, only items existing in this way can exist ‘wholly’ at a place. Christ’s divine person does not satisfy this description, and for this reason cannot be said to exist wholly at a place. Aquinas says nothing here about whether or not the human nature satisfies it, but he makes it clear elsewhere that it certainly does. For example, in a text in the same article as the one Brenz discusses, Aquinas claims that the whole Christ was in Hell (during the Triduum) even though his body was not—a claim incompatible with BMP as Brenz understands it: see Aquinas, ST III, q. 52, a. 3 ad 1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

114

 

Brenz is happy, like Luther, to follow the Scholastics in talking about ‘repletive’ presence,⁹⁷ and likewise in claiming that repletive presence is compatible with circumscriptive presence.⁹⁸ He also observes that if, as the Scholastics maintain, Christ’s body can be non-locally present at many places, what bar could there be on its being non-spatially present everywhere?⁹⁹ (In addition, Brenz proposes a rather nice ad hominem argument against Bullinger: if the body can be vivifying and adorable, it can surely be omnipresent, since ‘being a vivifier, or adorable, is not of lesser majesty than filling all things’.)¹⁰⁰ The account I have just presented nicely illustrates Brenz’s explanatory two-stage UC-ordering, discussed above: (sameness* of person → (hypostasis-assubject + genus maiestaticumB)). In his later works, as I shall show in Chapter 4, Brenz restructures the components, somewhat along the following lines: (( genus maiestaticumB = sameness* of person) → hypostasis-as-subject). He achieves this reconfiguration by stressing the perichoretic aspect of the union: the indwelling of the two natures, as we shall see. Brenz begins this line of thinking in the Sententia by raising the following question (doubtless inspired by the very different treatment of the issue in Melanchthon, discussed above): how we might distinguish God’s presence in Christ’s human nature from his presence in other human beings—‘by what difference (discrimen) God dwells in Christ and in other human beings’.¹⁰¹ As Brenz reasons, God is omnipresent, and thus generally present ‘by his essence and power’;¹⁰² he indwells the saints ‘by graces and gifts’.¹⁰³ What further mode of presence is available? The answer—which presupposes Brenz’s asymmetrical understanding of the communicatio—is the genus maiestaticum: In our Lord Jesus Christ alone ‘dwells the whole fullness of the Godhead corporeally’ [Col. 2:9]. For in Christ, the deity did not only dwell by its presence, essence, power, grace and other particular gifts, but it also truly so poured (effundit) itself out into the man that it assumed in unity of person, not indeed so that the substance of the deity was changed into the substance of humanity, but so that, in a different way, it [viz. the substance of humanity or assumed man] had all its glory and majesty. And it had this majesty already from the beginning of the assumption or Incarnation.¹⁰⁴

Notice that Brenz sets up the whole problem in terms of a distinction found in Peter Lombard, between different varieties of divine presence in the universe, or different senses of ‘indwelling’. According to Lombard, God is present to believers

⁹⁷ Brenz, De pers. unione, 30.15. ⁹⁸ See Brenz, De pers. unione, 28.36–28.1; 30.9–10. ⁹⁹ See Brenz, De pers. unione, 48.14–15. ¹⁰⁰ Brenz, De pers. unione, 40.31–2. ¹⁰¹ Brenz, Sent. 120.33–4. ¹⁰² Brenz, Sent. 120.30–1. ¹⁰³ Brenz, Sent. 122.6; for the whole discussion, see Sent. 120.29–122.10; also Sent., 126.3–15, 142.17–25. ¹⁰⁴ Brenz, Sent., 126.33–128.5.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

115

through various kinds of grace, and is generally present to the universe in the three other ways specified by Brenz too (‘presence, essence, power’): It should be kept in mind that God, who exists immutably in himself, is in every nature or essence by presence, by power, and by essence, without his being limited (sine sui definitione), and in every place without circumscription, and in every time without mutability. And furthermore he is in holy spirits and souls in a more excellent way, namely, indwelling by grace. And he is in the man Christ in the most excellent way, ‘in whom dwells the fullness of the Godhead corporeally’ (as the Apostle says [Col. 2:9]). For in him God dwelled not by the grace of adoption, but by the grace of union.¹⁰⁵

Lombard does not say much here about how he understands these modes of presence. But there was considerable unanimity about them from the thirteenth century onwards: to be present ‘by presence’ is to have cognitive access to the objects where one is present; to be present ‘by power’ is have a total or partial causal role with respect to the objects where one is present; and to be present ‘by essence’ is to be present in a further real way (open to specification) in some sense distinct from either of the first two modes.¹⁰⁶ The analogue of the third of these for the presence of standard physical bodies is spatial presence. God is fully present to the assumed nature in all four of these ways (presence, power, essence, grace). Suppose we think of the Incarnation as a particular kind of presence-relation, as Brenz seems to be doing here. What we need is a further mode of divine presence over and above those specified in Lombard’s taxonomy. And a creature’s possession of divine attributes would indeed look like a plausible candidate for such a mode. Brenz in effect maintains that what metaphysically distinguishes God’s presence in Christ’s human nature from God’s presence in other cases is its possession of (a subset of) divine attributes. For convenience, since it crops up a lot from this point in Brenz’s work, I refer to this and related lines of reasoning as the discrimen argument. I assume that the way he sets the issue up (in terms of a distinction between Christ and the saints) is a consequence of the way in which the problem is laid out in Brenz’s (unacknowledged) opponent, Melanchthon, for whom personal indwelling distinguishes the case of Christ from that of Elijah. But there is a radical difference: for Melanchthon, what is at stake in the difference between Christ and Elijah is that Christ is a divine person, and Elijah is not. For Brenz, what is at stake is that ‘the man Christ’ is a human nature that is in some sense subject to divine attributes; the saints are not. Overall, the discrimen argument allows Brenz to set out a necessary condition for unity of person as he sees it (i.e. complete spatial coincidence). As we shall see in Chapter 4, Brenz later builds on this to state what he takes the sufficient explanatory condition to be. ¹⁰⁵ Lombard, Sent. I, d. 37, c. 1, n. 2 (II, 263–4).

¹⁰⁶ See e.g. Aquinas, ST I, q. 8, a. 3 c.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

116

 

It is worth noting again something I have already observed: that from the very beginning of the debate theologians have tended to assimilate the views of Luther and Brenz. More particularly, as we shall see, they have tended to read Luther’s theology of the hypostatic union in the light of Brenz’s, and thus ascribe Brenz’s views, or something like them, to Luther. We shall see an explicit example in the next chapter, and more in Chapter 6. Brenz himself cites Luther in favour of his position, and thus clearly supposes that Luther’s theology supports his own. The last third of De personali unione is wholly devoted to a set of Latin translations of all the relevant sections of Luther’s anti-Zwinglian writings of the 1520s—the very writings that include Luther’s claims about bodily omnipresence.¹⁰⁷ If my argument in this chapter and the previous one has had any force, it should have shown that the assimilation of Luther’s views to Brenz’s rests on a deep confusion. Perhaps the first culprit was Brenz himself, generating a whole theology of the genus maiestaticum from comments in Luther intended for quite different ends.

2.5 Schwenckfeld I noted above Brenz’s apparent change of mind on the range of attributes communicated, motivated by the worry that the communication of the divine essence and certain divine attributes to the human substance would in effect turn that substance into a divine one. From the early 1520s onwards, the Silesian lay reformer Caspar Schwenckfeld developed a Christology that one might best think of as something that became a rather extreme version of Brenz’s—though the initial stages of Schwenckfeld’s distinctive views antedate Brenz’s, and ultimately became something of a thorn in the side for Brenz and his followers. Schwenckfeld himself was initially enthusiastic about Lutheran reforms, and in particular Luther’s high view of the status of Christ’s exalted nature; but Schwenckfeld’s mystical rather than forensic account of justification was seen by himself and others as ultimately incompatible with Lutheranism, and by the end of his life he was no longer part of the Lutheran Church. I discuss Schwenckfeld’s view only briefly, because it did not form part of what we might think of as the mainline Lutheran Christological controversies, and does not fit into the explicit dialectical context of the Christological treatises of Brenz’s that I discussed earlier in this chapter. If there was one thing that all sides in these controversies agreed on, it was that Schwenckfeld’s Christology was false. Although Brenz does not say so explicitly, there seems to me little doubt that avoiding Schwenckfeld’s view caused him to modify his account of the genus maiestaticum in a more restrictive direction—and thus indirectly

¹⁰⁷ See Brenz, De pers. unione, 80.3–104.24.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

117

generated a host of problems for Brenzian communicatio, including its unintentional failure to conform to Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Two components of Schwenckfeld’s Christology are worth mentioning for our purposes.¹⁰⁸ Both stem from his basic soteriological insight that human salvation consists in deification, and that human deification is achieved as a result of the prior deification of Christ’s human nature. The first is Schwenckfeld’s belief that Christ’s humanity is not a creature;¹⁰⁹ the second his claim that the deification of Christ’s human nature, achieved at the Exaltation, involves its ‘equalization (Gleichwerdung)’ with the essence—becoming ‘equal’ to the divine essence,¹¹⁰ or having ‘no essence (wesen) other than God’s essence’.¹¹¹ We shall see ample instances, in subsequent chapters, of theologians who deny that accepting the genus maiestaticum amounts to positing an equalization of the human nature and the divine essence, thereby seemingly trying to resist possible Schwenckfeldian interpretations of their views; and we shall likewise see ample instances in which opponents of Brenz-style Christologies attempt to assimilate such Christologies to Schwenckfeld’s. For Luther and Brenz, the worry was all the more urgent for two reasons: first, because Schwenckfeld shared Luther’s beliefs about the omnipresence of Christ’s (exalted) body, losing ‘all its dimension and proportion’ through the Exaltation,¹¹² and secondly because Schwenckfeld himself believed his teaching to be fully in the spirit of Brenz’s, as expressed in the first edition of the latter’s commentary on John’s Gospel. I deal with these two issues in turn. Luther’s 1540 Christological disputation, discussed at length in the previous chapter, constitutes a sustained argument against Schwenckfeld’s view that Christ’s human nature is not a creature. As Luther points out in the preface to the work, ‘the reason for the disputation’ is that ‘you shall be safe from all heretics, and even from Schwenckfeld, who says that Christ is [not] a creature’.¹¹³ And Luther is explicit about the result: ‘Eutyches dwells hidden in such heretics, ready someday to deny that the Word was made flesh.’¹¹⁴ Luther makes Schwenckfeld’s motivation for the view plain: ‘He says that the redeemer of the human race cannot be a creature, sit at the right hand of the Father, etc., be the seed of ¹⁰⁸ For Schwenckfeld’s Christology, see Paul L. Maier, Caspar Schwenckfeld on the Person and Work of Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 47–105 (Maier’s references, unfortunately, are not always wholly accurate); also R. Emmet McLaughlin, Caspar Schwenckfeld: Reluctant Radical. His Life to 1540, Yale Historical Publications Miscellany, 134 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 200–24; Gottfried Maron, Individualismus und Gemeinschaft bei Caspar von Schwenckfeld: Seine theologie, dargestellt mit besonderer Ausrichtung auf seinen Kirchenbegriff, Beiheft zum Jahrbuch ‘Kirche im Osten’, 2 (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1961), 46–66. ¹⁰⁹ See e.g. Schwenckfeld’s treatise on the error of claiming that Christ is a creature, passim (CS, no. 261 (VI, 90.1–94.5)). ¹¹⁰ Schwenckfeld, Auslegung dess CXXXIII Psalms (CS, no. 597 (X, 806.31)); see e.g. Schwenckfeld, Vom Fleische Christi (CS, no. 340 (VII, 338.1–2)). ¹¹¹ Schwenckfeld, Vom Fleische Christi (CS, no. 340 (VII, 338.10)). ¹¹² Schwenckfeld, Vom Fleische Christi (CS, no. 340 (VII, 338.10–17)). ¹¹³ Luther, Disp. de div., praef. (WA, XXXIX/2, 97.4, 15–16). ¹¹⁴ Luther, Disp. de div., th. 31 (WA, XXXIX/2, 95.1–2).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

118

 

Abraham; but the consequence is to be denied.’¹¹⁵ (The ‘consequence’ is the conditional, ‘if Christ is the redeemer, he cannot be a creature, etc.’)¹¹⁶ The bulk of the disputation is devoted to discerning orthodox senses of the claim that Christ is a creature, given that the natural reading of this locution is Arian, denying that Christ is God. (The solution, which need not concern us here, involves Luther’s ‘new word’ semantic analysis: the occurrences of ‘creature’ in the Arian and Catholic locutions are two different word-types, subject to completely different significations.) Schwenckfeld’s Christology likewise provides a very obvious explanation for Brenz’s apparent shift on the identity of the communicated attributes—expressly excluding beginninglessness and being uncreated. Just as for Luther, the key worry that Brenz has is that the human nature might fail to exist on the creaturely side of the creator–creature divide. Luther’s account of SG-possession means that seeing Christ’s human nature in this way is hardly a criticism that he is reasonably susceptible of. But on the face of it Brenz, given Brenzian communicatio, is highly vulnerable. Indeed, in 1543 Schwenckfeld assembled a list (not wholly accurate) of passages from the 1527 edition of Brenz’s commentary on John’s Gospel, highlighting texts in which Brenz ascribes to Christ’s exalted human nature divine attributes such as ‘power to judge’,¹¹⁷ ‘being of equal power, majesty, and rule with the Father’,¹¹⁸ and having ‘power over all creatures’.¹¹⁹ Given this, Schwenckfeld wonders why Brenz does not conclude that, since these attributes are incompatible with being a creature, it is simply false that Christ’s humanity is a creature.¹²⁰ And Schwenckfeld seems to assume some kind of Brenzian communicatio, according to which what is true of the man Christ must be true of the humanity.¹²¹ In effect, Schwenckfeld attempts to claim a (modified) Brenzian position as his own. Brenz’s express response to Schwenckfeld’s list contains nothing germane to the Christological issues I am interested in here.¹²² But in the same year as that in which Schwenckfeld compiled his list, the two theologians corresponded, and although we only have Schwenckfeld’s letters, happily they report sufficiently much of Brenz’s side of the debate for us to have a good idea of what he wanted to say.¹²³ According to Schwenckfeld, Christ’s human nature is not a creature. Brenz (rightly) concludes Schwenckfeld to be claiming that ‘by “creature” we ¹¹⁵ Luther, Disp. de div., praef. (WA, XXXIX/2, 110.2–3). Note here Luther’s implicit uncharacteristically spatial interpretation of Christ’s exalted presence. ¹¹⁶ On Schwenckfeld’s account of the relation between Christ and ‘the seed of Abraham’, see Maier, Caspar Schwenckfeld, 47–9, 54–7. ¹¹⁷ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 593.25–7). ¹¹⁸ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 595.1–2). ¹¹⁹ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 595.29). ¹²⁰ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 595.5–6). ¹²¹ See CS, no. 409 (VIII, 593.7–12, 37–40; 594.6–26). ¹²² For the response, see Brenz, Anecdota Brentiana: Ungedruckte Briefe und Bedenken, ed. T. Pressel (Tübingen: J. J. Heckenhauer, 1868), 71–88. ¹²³ For an account and analysis of the letters, and of the central role of Katharina Schütz Zell (1498–1562) in facilitating the correspondence, see Elsie Anne McKee, ‘A Lay Voice in SixteenthCentury “Ecumenics”: Katharina Schütz Zell in Dialogue with Johannes Brenz, Conrad Pellican, and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

  

119

cannot mean the substance of man (Substanz des menschens, substantiam hominis)’—it cannot be essential to humanity that it is a creature; but if it is not a creature, Brenz claims, ‘the humanity is absorbed into God’.¹²⁴ So according to Brenz, if the assumed nature is not a creature, it cannot be a human nature at all. Schwenckfeld, incidentally, has a rather nice reply to this: being a creature—and the question of origin in general—is not part of the ‘substance [i.e. essence] of a thing’, since it is not kind-specific.¹²⁵ What is essential to being human is ‘having a body and soul, and being rational, etc.’¹²⁶ Still, this would explain Brenz’s explicit disavowal of the view that being uncreated is among the communicated attributes. Read in the Schwenckfeldian way, Brenzian communicatio would indeed lead to the monophysitism that Brenz’s opponents held him to be susceptible to, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Schwenckfeld himself did not think that beginninglessness was an implication of being uncreated.¹²⁷ But an opponent could very reasonably disagree with this.

Caspar Schwenckfeld’, in Mack P. Holt (ed.), Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe: Essays in Honour of Brian G. Armstrong (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 81–110 (pp. 90–110). ¹²⁴ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 587.1–3). ¹²⁵ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 587.19–23). ¹²⁶ CS, no. 409 (VIII, 587.24–5). ¹²⁷ See Schwenckfeld, Apologia (CS, no. 638 (XI, 358.19–34)).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

3 Calvin and his Lutheran Opponents

Eucharistic conflict in early Reformation Germany—between parties in the north, sympathetic to Luther’s theology, and those in the south-west (prior to the dominance of Brenzian views) and Strasbourg, sympathetic at the time to something more akin to Zwingli’s—was temporarily settled at the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, largely thanks to the good offices of Melanchthon and Bucer, respectively from the two different sides.¹ Among other things, the concord affirmed Christ’s body to be ‘truly and substantially present (vere et substantialier adesse)’ in the Eucharist.² (The Zurich theologians, under the leadership of Bullinger, dissented, and accepted an alternative formulation set out in the First Helvetic Confession from the same year.) In 1549 the Churches of Geneva and Zurich, led by Calvin and Bullinger respectively, came to a different kind of agreement on doctrinal matters, including the Eucharist—the Consensus Tigurinus (Zurich Agreement), more or less adopting Calvin’s Eucharistic theology, but in a way that excluded Lutheran interpretations.³ The Lutherans, spearheaded by Joachim Westphal (1510/11–74) in his 1552 Farrago confusanearum et inter se dissidentium opinionum de Coena Domini,⁴ objected, and held that the Consensus upset the delicate balance of theological views in Germany itself. Calvin’s 1554 reply (Defensio doctrinae de sacramentis) provoked further response from Westphal and others, and the debate rumbled on through the 1550s. It would be untrue to say that the discussion between Calvin and Westphal underwent any significant development. The positions of both thinkers were entrenched, and the debate simply repeated itself with increasing rancour

¹ The Wittenberg formula is printed in Melanchthon, Epistulae, no. 1429 (CR, 3, cols. 75–81), and in Bucers Deutsche Schriften, ed. Robert Stupperich and others, 18 vols (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1960–2013), VI/1, 120–32; trans. Amy Nelson Burnett, in Gordon A. Jensen, The Wittenberg Concord: Creating the Space for Dialogue, Lutheran Quarterly (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2018), 191–4; Jensen’s book contains extensive discussion of the historical and theological background to the formula. ² CR, 3, col. 75; Bucers Deutsche Schriften, VI/1, 120.4; Burnett 191. ³ For the text, see Consensus Tigurinus: Die Einigung zwischen Heinrich Bullinger und Johannes Calvin über das Abendmahl, ed. Emidio Campi and Ruedi Reich (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2009), 125–42. For an English translation, see Calvin, Tracts, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844–9), II, 200–44. (This volume contains translations of a number of the treatises I refer to in this chapter.) On the Consensus see Ernst Bizer, Studien zur Geschichte des Abendmahlsstreits im 16. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962), 243–74. ⁴ Magdeburg, 1552.

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

121

and acrimony. Since the sequence of the discussion between Calvin and Westphal makes no real difference to the concepts involved, I help myself at will in what follows to things written by Calvin and Westphal between the years from 1552 to 1561. A further Lutheran response to Calvin’s treatises can be found in Hesshus, who contributed his own independent criticisms of Calvin in 1560, in turn provoking a further response from Calvin.⁵ The main focus of the discussions I examine in this chapter is Eucharistic; by and large, Christological matters are dealt with only in passing. (An exception is the brief systematic discussion of Christology in Calvin’s Institutes.) All three thinkers agree (against Zwingli and the post-1533 Melanchthon) that Christ’s body is life-giving, and thus have a more robust account of SG-possession than either Zwingli or the later Melanchthon. They disagree with each other on the way in which this power is exercised: either through an immediate non-spatial co-location relation to the effect (the Lutherans), or at a distance (Calvin). I suspect that the Lutherans both hold this power to be identical with a literally divine power, and I am certain that Calvin would deny this—albeit that neither point emerges clearly in the course of the discussion. But the Lutherans differ among themselves on the question of the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature (affirmed by Westphal, denied by Hesshus). Indeed, both Westphal and Hesshus were students of Melanchthon, and it is fair to say that they develop robustly majestic Christologies in ways that diverge sharply from Brenz—albeit that Westphal explicitly supposes Brenz and Luther to have been in agreement with each other (and with himself). I shall trace the later development of this particular kind of Lutheran Christology in Chapters 5 and 6, showing that the divergence between Brenzian and non-Brenzian majestic Christologies, apparent as early as the 1550s, remains just as sharp in the 1577 Formula of Concord. These various thinkers worked outside Wittenberg; as I shall also show in Chapter 6, the Wittenberg followers of Melanchthon simply adopt his later teaching, and reject majestic Christologies altogether. So we might think very roughly of the overall division of Lutheran Christologies as threefold: Melanchthonian (Wittenberg); non-Brenzian majestic (largely students or associates of Melanchthon working outside Wittenberg); and Brenzian (Württemberg/Tübingen).

⁵ The order of the remaining works that I discuss here is as follows: Westphal, Adversus cuiusdam sacramentarii falsam criminationem (1555); Calvin, Secunda defensio (1556); Calvin, Ultima admonitio (1557); Westphal, De coena domini confessio (1558); Westphal, Apologia confessionis de coena Domini (1558); Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis (1559); Hesshus, De praesentia corporis Christi (1560); Calvin, Dilucida expositio (1561). There are other treatises too, but they add nothing substantive to the debate. For the sequence of the whole debate, see conveniently Wulfert de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide, expanded edition, trans. Lyle D. Bierma (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 178–81.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

122

 

3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union 3.1.1 Calvin Calvin’s Christology shares various things with that found in Zwingli’s original response to Luther: for example, a commitment to CN-semantics, and a rejection of the possibility of bodily omnipresence. But Calvin diverges from Zwingli in significant ways, too: he allows that Christ’s body is life-giving (and thus allows SG-possession), and he offers the beginnings of an analysis of the apparent metaphysical error made in the crucial premise of Luther’s argument to bodily omnipresence (i.e. the IBS principle).⁶ Like Zwingli, Calvin accepts that the soul–body model is the best analogue for the hypostatic union, and he goes into some detail as to its suitability: We affirm his divinity so joined and united with his humanity that each retains its distinctive nature unimpaired, and yet these two natures constitute one Christ. If anything like this very great mystery can be found in human affairs, the most apposite parallel seems to be that of man, whom we see to consist of two substances. Yet neither is so mingled with the other as not to retain its own distinctive nature. For the soul is not the body, and the body is not the soul. Therefore, some things are said exclusively of the soul that can in no wise apply to the body; and of the body, again, that in no way fit the soul; of the whole man, that cannot refer—except inappropriately—to either soul or body. Finally, the characteristics of the mind are [sometimes] transferred to the body, and those of the body to the soul. Yet he who consists of these parts is one man, not many. Such expressions signify both that there is one person in man composed of two elements joined together, and that there are two diverse underlying natures that make up this person.⁷

I assume that at least some things said ‘exclusively’ of the soul, or of the body, should be said of the whole too—for example, thinks, walks, senses. So the way Calvin describes the soul–body model here suggests that, in a manner akin to the hypostatic union, we should construe the semantics of some locutions such as ‘a human being φs’ as ‘a human being has a nature that φs’, where the natures in question are soul and body. And in some cases, Calvin makes clear, it can be true that a human being φs even though it is not the case that just one of that being’s natures φs: in such cases, the predicate is true of the whole without being true of any one of the parts singly. Calvin immediately gives the relevant Christological parallels to the three kinds of case he considers: ⁶ For Calvin’s Christology in general, see E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1966). ⁷ Calvin, Inst. II, c. 14, §1 (in Calvin, Opera selecta, ed. P. Barth and G. Niesel, third edition, 5 vols (Munich: Kaiser, 1963–74), III, 458.21–459.2; trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols, LCC (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1950), I, 482, slightly altered).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

123

Thus, also, the Scriptures speak of Christ: they sometimes attribute (attribuunt) to him what must be referred (referri) solely to his humanity, sometimes what belongs (competant) uniquely to his divinity; and sometimes what embraces both natures but pertains to neither alone. And they so earnestly express this union of the two natures that is in Christ as sometimes to interchange them. This figure of speech is called by the ancient writers ἰδιωμάτων κοινωνία [i.e. the communion of properties].⁸

I take it that theandric activity would be an instance of the third case that Calvin notes here. The claim that the predicates are ‘attributed’ to Christ—that is, to the person—makes it clear that the predications, appropriately interpreted, are true; the fact that the predicates are ‘referred’ or ‘belong’ solely to one or other of the natures (for example) makes it clear that the natures are the subjects of inherence: just as for CN-semantics. (I assume Calvin takes ‘referri’ and ‘competere’ to be synonyms or near synonyms.) Calvin expressly asserts that the communicatio is a ‘figure of speech’, and thus follows Zwingli in holding that the truth-values of such locutions are contextsensitive: they are prima facie false, and require interpretation. As Calvin puts it a bit later in the discussion, ‘the things that he carried out in his [viz. Christ’s] human nature are transferred improperly, although not without reason, to his divinity.’⁹ Zwingli is therefore evidently in the background. As I have noted, Zwingli talks of the predication relation as a case of ‘attributing’ something to a hypostasis, and of the corresponding ontological relation as a case of something’s ‘being referred’ to a nature. Calvin adopts just the same distinction here, and, as we saw in Chapter 2, Melanchthon uses the terminology of ‘attribution’ to talk about the predication relation too. As far as I can see, Calvin’s position on the communicatio is just Zwingli’s type-two alloiosis.¹⁰ This discussion does not quite bring out the Chalcedonian claim that Christ is identical with the second person of the Trinity. But Calvin elsewhere, rejecting the view of Nestorius, makes it plain that this is what he thinks: ‘We therefore hold that Christ, as he is God and man, consisting of two natures united but not mingled, is our Lord and the true Son of God even according to, but not by reason of, his humanity.’¹¹

⁸ Calvin, Inst. II, c. 14, §1 (III, 459.2–9; Battles, I, 482–3, slightly altered). ⁹ Calvin, Inst. II, c. 14, §2 (III, 46017–19; Battles, I, 484). ¹⁰ Contrast Pannenberg’s mistaken assessment: ‘In distinction from Zwingli, Calvin did not consider the communication of attributes a mere figure of speech. He found its basis in a real transfer of attributes of both natures to the person of the Mediator’ ( Jesus: God and Man, 299). The communicatio is, according to Zwingli and Calvin, a principle about semantics; but for both theologians the relevant Christological predications, appropriately interpreted, are true. And note, of course, that the understandings are in accordance with Cyril’s account of the semantics of the relevant locutions. Pannenberg seems in effect to ascribe LH-semantics to Calvin. ¹¹ Calvin, Inst. II, c. 14, §4 (III, 463.14–17; Battles, I, 486).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

124

 

And Calvin argues strongly against the view—later defended by Brenz, as we shall see in the next chapter—that the union might in some sense be constituted by the genus maiestaticum: ‘The hypostatic union of the two natures is not equivalent to a communication of the immensity of the Godhead to the flesh, since the peculiar properties of both natures are perfectly accordant with unity of person.’¹² That is to say, unity of person is independent of the genus maiestaticum or SG-possession.

3.1.2 Westphal Westphal’s Christological focus—set out in a series of works published in 1558—is on the metaphysics of bodily presence, rather than the hypostatic union as such. Westphal wrote a great number of polemical treatises in defence of Lutheran views on Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Christological discussions of a strictly technical nature are wholly absent. At one point, in the De coena domini confessio Westphal apparently explains why: Zwingli, in the controversy about the Eucharist, once began a disputation about the properties of the human nature in Christ, and pursued it vehemently against the magnanimous hero Dr Luther. . . . In my books I have carefully abstained from this difficult debate, which comprises questions about the wonderful hypostatic union of two natures in Christ, about their properties, about his Exaltation and Session at the right hand of God the Father, about the communicatio idiomatum, about the divided action (distra[cta?] actione) of the person, about the glory and prerogatives of the body of Christ, assumed by the Word and placed at the right hand of the Father, and about many recondite mysteries that I prefer to adore by simple faith than to investigate very carefully. These things should be treated from Scripture, religiously, soberly, in the fear of God, and having consulted (and not just carelessly considered) the writings of the old [theologians]. Among whom, as in other important theological matters, men illuminated by the light of the Holy Spirit (Dr Martin Luther, Dr Johannes Bugenhagen, and Dr Johannes Brenz) seem to have deeply seen, and nearly to have achieved, the goal of truth. The things that, in their books, they have written about this topic—which have a similarity with Scripture and the Catholic faith—are not to be rejected and condemned lightly, in the way that the Sacramentarians do. . . . I am aware of myself and I know how foolish and obtuse the eye of my mind is in examining mysteries placed so high above contemplation,

¹² Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 507; Beveridge, II, 558; also printed with slight alterations in Calvin, Theological Treatises, ed. J. K. S. Reid, LCC, 22 (London: SCM Press, 1954), 311–12.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

125

but by the modesty and humility by which I should, I present myself, in order to render back the notion of my simple faith.¹³

A number of salient points emerge from this passage. The first is that Westphal claims simply to follow Luther, Bugenhagen, and Brenz on Christological matters. Secondly, as we shall see, the view Westphal describes is some sort of composite, including parts of Luther’s view and parts of Brenz’s: so Westphal is an early example of a theologian assimilating the views of the two theologians. Thirdly, Westphal claims that the controversy arose with Zwingli (a ‘Sacramentarian’) and this theologian’s views on the properties of Christ’s human nature—presumably, its lack of bodily presence in the Eucharist. On the face of it, this gets the order in reverse: it seems that Luther started the Christological debate with his claims about the omnipresence of Christ’s body. Westphal, then, here quite wrongly presents Luther as holding the traditional view. Finally, Westphal presents himself as someone lacking sufficient intellectual capacity to deal with Christological issues. This, I suspect, is true: Westphal could be a vicious and angry controversialist; nevertheless he did indeed avoid Christological discussions, and perhaps genuinely felt the difficulty of the topic and his own limitations in relation to it. Of course, being both enthusiastic for debate and incompetent to undertake it can make for a vexing combination, and one can sense from Calvin’s responses that his patience was frequently tried by Westphal’s mordant petulance.¹⁴ We perhaps find, incidentally, a similar elision of the view of Luther, Brenz, and Bugenhagen in another writer working in the 1550s, Johannes Timann (1497–1557). In his Farrago sententiarum consententium in vera et catholica doctrina de Coena Domini,¹⁵ written against Melanchthon’s friend and associate Albert Hardenberg (c. 1510–74),¹⁶ Timann quotes a number of views affirming the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature, without expressly distinguishing between them, beginning with Luther, followed immediately by Brenz.¹⁷ Again, this gives the impression that Luther and Brenz agree with each other. It is not clear that either author, Timann or Westphal, noticed the great difference between the two views. (Timann quotes Bugenhagen too, but only to the effect that Zwingli’s type-one alloiosis allegedly involves dividing the natures.)¹⁸ ¹³ Westphal, De coena domini confessio (Ursel, 1558), fols. C2r–C3r. ¹⁴ Zwingli, incidentally, responded rather differently to similarly intemperate features in Luther’s rhetoric, and sometimes seems to find Luther’s rather pungent language an object of humour: see e.g. Zwingli, Amica exegesis, CR, 372, 655.3–4. Zwingli ascribes Luther’s views on Christ’s omnipresence to some kind of mental lapse, likening it to one of Homer’s occasional nods: see Amica exegesis, CR, 372, 569.10–12. ¹⁵ Frankfurt-am-Main, 1555. ¹⁶ On Hardenberg, see Wim Janse, Albert Hardenberg als Theologe: Profil eines Bucer-Schülers, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 57 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994). On Christological controversies surrounding Hardenberg, involving Westphal, Timann, and Johannes Bötker, which I do not have space to deal with here, see Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 44–61, 82–92; Bizer, Studien, 275–84. ¹⁷ See Timann, Farrago, 225–34. ¹⁸ See Timann, Farrago, 240–7.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

126

 

3.1.3 Hesshus If Westphal’s appetite for controversy somewhat exceeded his capacity for intelligent discussion, Hesshus was an opponent of an altogether different intellectual calibre.¹⁹ In his early Eucharistic and Christological treatises, dating from the 1560s, Hesshus says little about the metaphysics of the hypostatic union, resting content with the claim that the natures are united in one person,²⁰ and that the human nature is ‘personally united to God the Word’.²¹ (I quote relevant passages below.) On the communicatio idiomatum, Hesshus follows Melanchthon and the Scholastic theologians in supposing that the Incarnation necessarily licenses predication of the person in concreto, and he is later on very clear about the distinction between abstract and concrete, as we saw in section 0.3, pp. 29–30. For example, he denies (as we shall see in the next section) that Christ’s body is omnipresent. But he is clear that this denial is quite independent of claims to the effect that the man (Christ) is everywhere: So that it is evident that the distinction between the human and divine natures²² in the risen Christ remains, we do not say that the body of Christ is everywhere, but we accept a way of speaking (modum loquendi) bequeathed by the Fathers: Christ is everywhere, namely, by the communicatio idiomatum: that is, the divinity is everywhere, and on account of the hypostatic union of the two natures a property of one nature is attributed to the whole person in concreto.²³

This is just the standard Scholastic understanding of the communicatio, applied to the question of the person’s omnipresence. And note Hesshus’s apparent acceptance of CN-semantics (‘Christ is everywhere . . . that is, the divinity is everywhere . . . and a property of one nature is attributed to the whole person in concreto’): something he is explicit about in his later Christological writings.²⁴ Thus far, Hesshus and Calvin are in accord.

3.2 Vivification and Bodily Presence I noted above that all three of my thinkers accept that Christ’s body is life-giving, but that they disagree on the way in which this power is exercised. The Lutherans suppose that such exercise requires bodily presence in some sense where the effect

¹⁹ On Hesshus’s Christology, see Krüger, Empfangene Allmacht. ²⁰ Hesshus, De praesentia corporis Christi in coena Domini (Jena, 1560), fol. Dir. ²¹ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Nviir. Later in his career, he affirms some version of the supposital union, though not in such a way as to show how it might be clearly distinguished from any merely causal relationship: see De duabus, fols. D1v–D2r, E3v. ²² ‘ . . . discrimen humanae natura [lege: naturae] et divinae’. ²⁴ See Hessbus, De duabus, fols. D1v, E4r. ²³ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Cviir.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

127

is; Calvin denies this. So in this section I examine the two different Lutheran views, and Calvin’s response. In the next section I examine Calvin’s view, and the Lutheran responses.

3.2.1 Westphal As I have just noted, Westphal claims simply to be following the Christological views of Luther, Bugenhagen, and Brenz. On the metaphysics of bodily presence, Westphal seems to presuppose something like Brenz’s reasoning, found clearly in the Stuttgart Colloquy of 1556, discussed in section 2.3.3, p. 106, in favour of the view that local presence is an accidental feature of a body, a view that Westphal first adopts in 1558, as far as I know. For example, as part of his defence, in this same year, of the non-local presence of Christ’s body, he says the following: Rightly is the word, truth, and omnipotence of Christ more valuable to us than the foolish and impious reasoning of Calvin, taken from the logical predicables,²⁵ that the body of Christ is not present in the Eucharist unless it is visible, since for a body to be visible is an inseparable quality. Anxiously he takes care of the movements in dialectical rules, lest a proper quality be separated from the body of Christ. But how much more worthy was it for a theologian to care greatly that the truth and omnipotence of the body exalted above all creatures not be separated from the words of Christ; or its majesty and immense glory [not be separated] from the Church of Christ; or his body and blood [not be separated] from the most Holy Supper. These are not at all (minime) separable, but Christ’s visible quality is easily separated by benign will and power, by dispensation, until that time when it will manifestly be seen in his glorious appearing.²⁶

The Reformed worry—which I discuss below—is that Christ’s body cannot be both present and invisible. Westphal’s basic thought is that being visible is an accident of Christ’s body, and that a body can lack any given accident. So Christ’s body can indeed be present and invisible. Westphal holds, however, that properties salient to the genus maiestaticum—he here mentions omnipotence, majesty, immensity (i.e. omnipresence), glory, truth, and presence in the Eucharist—are, unlike visibility, genuinely inseparable from Christ’s body. Elsewhere, Westphal makes it clear that he includes being life-giving among the properties of Christ’s body.²⁷ But note that Westphal associates these majestic attributes with the Exaltation, not the Incarnation—in sharp contrast to Brenz. So I take it that the inseparability of these majestic attributes is merely a function of the exalted body. ²⁵ ‘ . . . praedicabilibus dialectes [lege: dialecticis]’. ²⁶ Westphal, Apologia confessionis de coena Domini (Ursel, 1558), 254–5. ²⁷ Westphal, Apol., 149.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

128

 

In accusing Calvin of relying on the predicables outlined in Porphyry’s Isagoge, Westphal is suggesting that Calvin is guided by philosophy rather than revelation—an accusation Calvin strenuously resists, as I show below.²⁸ (Westphal as it happens does not get Porphyry quite right. Westphal identifies visibility (in his opponent’s analysis) as both a proper and an inseparable accident. But according to Porphyry, there is a difference between the two kinds of accident: strictly speaking proper accidents (‘properties (idia)’, in Porphyry’s technical vocabulary) are inseparable features that can belong only to things of the same species; inseparable accidents as such are not kind-specific.²⁹ At any rate, the point is clear enough: Westphal denies the claim that being visible fits into either of the two Porphyrian categories, and is thus a merely contingent accident, one which its substance can lose.) Westphal says very little positive on the nature of the presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist—and nothing at all on the nature of the body’s omnipresence. Basically, he identifies local presence as circumscriptive presence, such that ‘the space of the place corresponds to the space of the body’,³⁰ and denies that either Lutherans or even Roman Catholics understand Eucharistic presence in this way.³¹ In this manner, he simply specifies the content of Luther’s teaching on definitive presence against persistent Reformed misrepresentation, without offering any substantive clarification.

3.2.2 Hesshus Hesshus has a strong account of the communication of the majesty in general, as I shall show in a moment, and says a great deal more on these various topics than Westphal manages to.³² But, like Westphal, he restricts the possession of majestic properties to Christ’s Exaltation, understanding the Session at God’s right hand to indicate Christ’s Exaltation, and to consist in the possession of majestic properties: ‘We affirm that Christ’s Session at the right hand [of the eternal Father] signifies the Exaltation into reign, the victory, majesty, light, glory, and the domination of the universe of creatures with equal power, wisdom, and authority with the Father and Holy Spirit.’³³ And this power is not just judicial; it is metaphysical: the power to sustain all creatures, and to ‘do all’. Thus, commenting on Eph. 1:20 (‘God put

²⁸ For the accusation, see too Westphal, Adversus cuiusdam sacramentarii falsam criminationem (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1555), 69; it is levelled against Zwingli in Westphal, Adv. sac., 113–14. ²⁹ See Porphyry, Isag., 22.5–9; Spade, 19 (§121). ³⁰ Westphal, Apologia, 303. ³¹ Westphal, Apologia, 297–8. ³² For the Eucharistic debate between Calvin and Hesshus, see David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 172–87. ³³ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Nivv.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

129

this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand’), Hesshus notes: Paul clearly shows that in this article (‘he sits at the right hand’) it is not signified that he [viz. Christ] is circumscribed in a particular place, but rather that Christ is exalted above all heavens by divine power, and reigns with the Father, with complete majesty and authority over all angels, with equal power, wisdom, honour, and glory, and that he has as subjects all creatures together, angels and humans, heaven and earth, to such a degree that the flesh, which is created but united to the Logos and exalted to rule is now Lord of all the world together, and understands all, sustains all, can do all, and governs all.³⁴

Obviously, ‘flesh’ here is a way of referring to the human nature, by synecdoche. And Hesshus mentions, as properties of the exalted human nature, in addition to omnipotence and omniscience, being life-giving,³⁵ adorable,³⁶ and able to forgive sins.³⁷ These are ipsissima divine attributes. What is communicated are the divine attributes themselves: ‘The human nature of Christ, since it is united to the Logos, has sublime prerogatives and certain properties common with the divine essence.’³⁸ I assume that ‘common’ is supposed to indicate identity. Certainly, in his later writings, Hesshus proposes an account of the divine nature that is intended to show how it might be that the divine attributes can be communicated, and thus, on the assumption that the account I am discussing here accepts numerical identity, to clarify what looks like a lacuna in this account: in effect, he responds to the Augustinian problem by rejecting divine simplicity. (I mention it in section 6.3.2, pp. 222–3, n. 168, because it is of great intrinsic interest, and provides a point of contrast to what Chemnitz claims. But coming from the late 1580s it falls outside the temporal snapshot that this chapter constitutes.) There is, however, no evidence that Hesshus has any kind of theory at this earlier point in his career. At any rate, the material in the previous paragraph allows us to construct the semantics that Hesshus accepts for the genus maiestaticum, since Hesshus endorses the claim that the human nature has divine attributes, and, in accordance with this, licenses locutions in which these attributes are predicated of the nature: HGM-semantics:

‘Christ’s human nature h is φd’ =def ‘h has Φd-ness’.

This list of attributes just given includes both powers and activities. Notably for the purposes of Eucharistic theology, it includes being life-giving. It does not, however, include omnipresence. As we have just seen, Heshuss glosses talk of the

³⁴ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Nvv; see also fol. Nvir. ³⁶ See Hesshus, De praes., fols. Niiv–Niiir. ³⁵ See Hesshus, De praes., fols. Diiir, Fvir, Niir. ³⁸ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Oiir. ³⁷ See Hesshus, De praes., fol. Niiir–v.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

130

 

human nature’s heavenly location in terms of other divine attributes. And in contrast to Westphal he expressly denies omnipresence: We believe and teach that Christ is a true man, and even after the glorification had a true and natural human body and soul. . . . Since the natures in Christ remained distinct, we do not say that the human flesh is everywhere (ubique), or equal to the divine essence. We do not say that the body of Christ is in a stick, or a stone, or crops. Otherwise, what was the point of the task of instituting the Lord’s Supper?³⁹

Hesshus has, it seems to me, an entirely natural reaction to Luther’s claims: bodily omnipresence seems to render the Eucharist superfluous, and thus asserting it seems to prove too much against Zwingli. Rather, what is required for the Eucharist is simply the capacity to be in more than one place at once, as in Scholastic teaching. Hesshus appeals to this possibility to explain not only the Eucharistic presence, but also Christ’s presence in the Church, and in certain kinds of mystical experience. In relation to Paul’s vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, Hesshus remarks: Did Christ then leave the right hand of the Father? By no means. We submit to omnipotent divine power, and know that the body of Christ is personally united to God the Word, and for this reason that it is not difficult for Christ to be present to his whole living and dispersed Church, in very different places, not only with respect to his divine nature, but also with respect to his human nature. . . . It is not absurd to confess that Christ can exist in many places, wherever he wills, even with respect to his human nature.⁴⁰

And the application to the Eucharist is obvious: Thus, about the Holy Supper we also affirm that the body of Christ, which is in heaven and, united to the Word, sits at the right hand of God the Father, is nevertheless distributed at distinct places to be eaten, not only in relation to efficacy, but also in relation to substance.⁴¹

The last qualifications (‘not only in relation to efficacy, but also in relation to substance’) reflect the teachings of the later Melanchthon, and are, as we shall see, a way of excluding the precise variety of presence that Calvin affirms. But obviously, Hesshus’s affirmation of the life-giving nature of Christ’s body places his teaching on the question of SG-possession at considerable distance from Melanchthon’s. Apart from the worry that bodily omnipresence proves too much, Hesshus’s reason for rejecting omnipresence is that he only ascribes to Christ’s human nature those divine properties the possession of which he thinks is warranted by ³⁹ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Cviv. For a summary of views on omnipresence, see Table 3. ⁴¹ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Dir–v; see too fol. Niiiv. ⁴⁰ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Dir.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

131

Scripture. Being present in the Eucharist—and hence, ‘in many places at will’—is scriptural. But for Christ’s body to be omnipresent is not.⁴² Here, then, we again see the multivolipraesentia found in Medieval theology and some later Lutheran traditions. Hesshus does not commit himself to any theory of the non-spatial location of Christ’s glorified body or its presence in the Eucharist. He claims merely that the exalted body of Christ ‘is exalted above every place’,⁴³ and that the presence in the Eucharist is non-circumscriptive.⁴⁴ Hesshus repeats a recurrent Lutheran trope: the Reformed party is led not by Scripture but by what is acceptable within the confines of Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian natural philosophy.⁴⁵ One obvious consequence of all this is that Hesshus must deny Luther’s IBS principle. He glosses talk of bodily inseparability in terms of divine action: ‘The person of the Logos can be rightly thought to be nowhere outside the body of Christ; neither should we think that the divine nature of Christ, to the extent that it is united to the human in one person, does anything without and beyond (extra et praeter) the human nature.’⁴⁶ So bodily inseparability just means that the Word does nothing without the human nature. Hesshus claims instead that what is entailed by the hypostatic union is merely the capacity of the body to be made present ‘where the Logos is’: possible, not actual, omnipresence: ‘If the human nature is restricted to one place, and that substance cannot be where the Logos is, how can we establish that there is one hypostasis?’⁴⁷ The argument is not wholly clear, since the one-way spatial inseparability that Hesshus accepts does not exclude the human nature from being ‘where the Logos is’ in Hesshus’s sense— that is to say, at one or more of the places where the Word is. And it is not evident to me in any case why Heshuss thinks that the denial of possible multilocation is incompatible with the hypostatic union. He goes on to make an argument to the effect that possible bodily omnipresence, and various other majestic features, can be had only by a human nature united to a divine person.⁴⁸ But this merely states a necessary condition for possessing a power to be omnipresent, not a sufficient one.

3.2.3 Calvin According to the Lutherans Calvin opposes, the possible multilocation of Christ’s body is a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union. Calvin offers at least six reasons against accepting this. ⁴² See Hesshus, De praes., fol. Nviir. ⁴³ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Nvir. ⁴⁵ See Hesshus, De praes., fols. Mviiv, Nvr. ⁴⁴ See Hesshus, De praes., fols. Nivr–v, Evv. ⁴⁶ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Nviir. ⁴⁷ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Mivv. On the discontinuity between omnipresence and omnipotence in Heshuss, see Krüger, Empfangene Allmacht, 81–2. ⁴⁸ See Hesshus, De praes., fol. Mvr; also fol. Niir–v.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

132

 

(1) The basic one is that this possibility is simply incompatible with nature of a human body: They object that the person of Christ is dissolved by us, because we deny that he can be in his human nature wheresoever he pleases. If this is to dissolve the person, it will be necessary to rob the human nature of everything that is most proper to it, lest he cease to be mediator.⁴⁹

I just noted Hesshus’s accusation that Calvin is constrained by an adherence to Aristotelianism.⁵⁰ So Calvin rather prudently appeals to Augustine in support of his view: Augustine plainly asserts that our Saviour, in respect of his human nature, is in heaven, whence he will come at the last day; that in respect of human nature he is not everywhere diffused, because though he gave immortality to his flesh, he did not take away its nature; that we must therefore beware of raising the divinity of the man so as to destroy the reality of the body; that if we take away locality from bodies they will be situated nowhere, and consequently not exist.⁵¹

Calvin makes much the same argument by drawing an inference from bodily omnipresence to Eutychianism: Some are carried away with such contentiousness as to say that because of the natures joined in Christ, wherever Christ’s divinity is, there also is his flesh, which cannot be separated from it, as if that union had compounded from two natures some sort of intermediate being which was neither God nor man. So, indeed, did Eutyches teach.⁵²

The reasoning here is admittedly not completely transparent. Perhaps Calvin’s idea is that attributing omnipresence to the human nature means that divine and human attributes are ascribed to one and the same nature: and this would seem to result in that nature’s being neither divine nor human (‘neither God nor man’). But this would seem to be moving a little quickly: one could imagine a case—as with the non-Eutychian miaphysites of the Early Church—in which the one nature had the complete list of attributes necessary and sufficient for being divine, and the complete list of attributes necessary and sufficient for being human. Such a one-natured being would indeed be both God and man. Perhaps what Calvin means is that ascribing divine properties to the human nature would result in the obliteration of the human nature, as in the second text just quoted. In this case, ⁴⁹ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 194; Beveridge, II, 417–18, altered. ⁵⁰ On this, see Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 215; Beveridge, II, 445–6. ⁵¹ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 168; Beveridge, II, 382; see too Ult. ad., CR, 37, cols. 169, 171, 215; Beveridge, II, 383–4, 386, 445–6; the reference is to Augustine, Ep. 187 [Ad Dardanum] (Epistulae. Pars 4, ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL, 57 (Vienna and Leipzig: F. Tempsky, 1896), 89.9–11; also 83.11, 118.18–19). ⁵² Calvin, Inst. IV, c. 17, §30 (V, 388.20–4; Battles, II, 1402).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

133

the question is one of theological anthropology, and clearly Calvin and his opponents have a genuine disagreement here. Construing the argument in this way, however, would secure the conclusion that the union results in something that ‘was not . . . man’, but not the conclusion that it ‘was neither God nor man’, as in the argument considered at the very opening of this subsection. (2) The second argument is that bodily omnipresence is incompatible with other forms of bodily presence. It occurs in two different forms. One is that repletive presence is inconsistent with circumscriptive presence: ‘God has manifold and various ways of existing in a place. But this variety cannot have made the body of Christ, when he instituted the Supper, to be in one place visible, finite, and mortal, and at the same time in several places, invisible, immense, and immortal.’⁵³ The other is that this inconsistency would therefore require anyone accepting the omnipresence of Christ’s body to posit two bodies—one circumscriptively present, and the other repletively present (since these features cannot be properties of just one body): Let them explain how the Lord gave to his disciples, under the bread, the same body which was visibly before them. If they insist that he was substantially swallowed under the bread, his nature was double. In one place it was visible and mortal; and it was elsewhere, or nowhere, and yet at the same time lurked everywhere, hidden and endued with celestial glory.⁵⁴

The double nature here is a double body,⁵⁵ and the assumption is that incompatible properties require two (or more) distinct subjects. Calvin’s view—that the divine person is both omnipresent and present circumscriptively at a place—is not open to the same objection, because Calvin construes these claims according to CN-semantics (Christ has a nature that is omnipresent, and Christ has a nature that is circumscriptively in a place), and construed in this way, the claims are not incompatible. The argument, of course, is a reductio of the view of his opponent here, Westphal: neither Calvin nor Westphal accepts that Christ has two bodies in this way. (3) According to Calvin, if bodily omnipresence is communicated to the human nature, certain other divine attributes should be too: ‘Surely the soul of Christ approached nearer to divinity than his body, and yet Luther did not on this account admit that Christ, as man, had always a foreknowledge of all things.’⁵⁶ Luther, then, is inconsistent. But I think Luther would have a ready reply here: the argument for two-way spatial inseparability is just an argument about the implications of Chalcedonian inseparability, and does not obviously generalize to other ⁵³ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 240; Beveridge, II, 479. ⁵⁴ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, cols. 187–8; Beveridge, II, 408; see too Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 167; Beveridge, II, 380–1. ⁵⁵ See Calvin, Inst. IV, c. 17, §29 (V, 384.15; Battles, II, 1398). ⁵⁶ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 239; Beveridge, II, 478–9.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

134

 

divine attributes. (Calvin’s ‘nearer’ is ambiguous between spatial proximity and degree of value.) The discussion shows that, even if Luther and Westphal were in Calvin’s sights, Brenz does not seem to have been, since he is not guilty of the alleged inconsistency—at least, as we have seen, not until 1561, four years after this argument from Calvin. (4) A fourth argument relies on an analogy: Scripture declares that our bodies will be made conformable to the glorious body of Christ; but our bodies will not then be everywhere: therefore, neither is the body of Christ everywhere. They [viz. the Lutherans] answer, that it is vicious to argue from a qualified case to an unqualified one. But let them show where the dissimilarity is in the present case. I admit that the degrees of glory in the head and members will not be equal; but in so far as it pertains to the nature of the body, there will be no conformity unless that flesh which is the type and model of our resurrection retains its dimensions.⁵⁷

Elsewhere, Calvin states the contrapositive of the argument: ‘Unless he [viz. Westphal] hold that after the resurrection we shall be everywhere, the flesh of Christ, as Paul testifies, cannot now possess any immensity.’⁵⁸ The Lutheran response that Calvin reports accuses him of arguing from qualified to unqualified statements—that is to say, generalizing from what applies in the typical case to what applies in every case. Calvin’s counter-response challenges the Lutherans to show just in what way the analogy between Christ’s resurrected body and other resurrected bodies is not salient. The contrast, he claims, is one of degree, not of kind. (We will see a different version of this argument in Bullinger half a decade later: see section 4.3.1, pp. 152–3.) (5) The arguments thus far considered aim to rebut the Lutheran view. But Calvin also offers a pair of arguments the purpose of which is to undermine the grounds offered by the Lutherans in favour of omnipresence. Calvin avails himself of the principle from Lombard that, as we saw in Chapter 2, Brenz was to reject just a couple of years later: ‘There is a commonplace distinction of the Schools to which I am not ashamed to refer: although the whole Christ is everywhere, still the whole of that which is in him is not everywhere.’⁵⁹ The idea—on the face of it obviously true and fatal both to IBS and GMP as general principles—is that unity does not require that each part of a whole is where the whole thing is. This is the so-called extra Calvinisticum mentioned in Chapter 1—the view that Christ’s

⁵⁷ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 224; Beveridge, II, 458, altered. ⁵⁸ Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 175; Beveridge, II, 391. ⁵⁹ Calvin, Inst. IV, c. 17, §30 (V, 389.12–14; Battles, II, 1403); see Lombard, Sent. III, d. 22, c. 3, nn. 1–2 (II, 138–9). Calvin repeats this claim several times in the course of his debate with Westphal (and later Hesshus): see Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, cols. 194–5, 246; Beveridge, II, 418, 488; Dil. exp., CR, 37, cols. 476, 507; Beveridge, II, 515, 558; Reid, 275, 311.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

135

body is not omnipresent, and thus that the divinity is not confined to his body. (The designation is curious, since of course the view that Calvin puts forward here is indeed ‘a commonplace’ of the Schools, and for that matter of Patristic Christology too.) Brenz, incidentally, does not mention Calvin in this context, and it is not clear to me whether or not Calvin is his target. (6) By way of undermining, Calvin offers, too, a diagnosis of what he takes to be the mistaken semantics underlying the Lutheran position: We do not teach that because the body of Christ is finite, he is himself confined within the same dimensions; rather, we assert that he fills all things. . . . But as the question is concerning the flesh, we insist on it [viz. the finitude of Christ’s body]. In short, we fully illustrate the distinction between the flesh of Christ in the abstract and his person, while they most perversely confound it. For in order to prove that the flesh of Christ is immense and everywhere, they repeatedly insist that there is one person in Christ, and that he therefore fills heaven and earth in respect of his flesh as well as his divinity. Do they not drag the body of Christ in the abstract as it were by the hair, in making it follow the divinity wherever it extends?⁶⁰

Calvin notices the salience of the concrete/abstract distinction for Christology, and the distinction between hypostasis-predication and nature-predication, and claims that the Lutherans ignore it, here by accepting something akin to BMP: what is true of the whole person must be true of his humanity as well, at least in relation to omnipresence.

3.3 Vivification and Causal Presence 3.3.1 Calvin Unlike Zwingli, Calvin does not deny all SG-possession. In particular, he holds, as I have already noted, that the human nature is life-giving. Underlying this assertion is a very different Eucharistic theology from those of both Zwingli and Melanchthon, one which is more robust on the question of SG-possession than either. And the way in which Calvin spells out the mechanisms of Eucharistic vivification provides him with a novel and creative account of the presence of Christ’s body at places in the universe. But the account comes with a price: it may

⁶⁰ Calvin, Ult. ad. CR, 37 col. 229; Beveridge, II, 465, altered. Calvin directs the same criticism to Hesshus too (see Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, cols. 475–6; Beveridge, II, 514–15, slightly altered; Reid, 274–5), and immediately interprets Hesshus’s multivolipraesentia in terms of omnipresence—for reasons more polemical than principled, I take it (see Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 476; Beveridge, II, 515; Reid, 275).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

136

 

be just as incompatible with human nature as Calvin believes Lutheran bodily omnipresence to be—as I will explain in a moment.⁶¹ In general, Calvin maintains that the resurrected body of Christ has certain supernatural attributes that are nevertheless compatible with being a human body: ‘I know, indeed, that the mortal body which Christ once assumed is now endued with new qualities of celestial glory, which, however, do not prevent it from being in substance the same body.’⁶² Among these are immortality,⁶³ and, relevantly for our purposes, being life-giving: ‘When the life-giving Son of God dwelt in the flesh, and was in whole, so to speak, united to the ineffable whole by the mode of union, he made the flesh itself vivifying, and hence this flesh gives life to all who partake of it.’⁶⁴ Calvin is here fighting on two sides at once: he wants to say more about Eucharistic presence than Zwingli had done, and a focus on the causal role of Christ’s body in the Eucharist enables him to do this (something I return to in a moment); but he wants too to oppose the view defended by the Lutheran Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) according to which ‘righteousness is conferred on the believer by the deity of Christ’.⁶⁵ As Osiander saw it, justification consists in the divine nature, identified with divine justice, indwelling the believer so as to ‘become’ the believer’s justice.⁶⁶ Calvin objects that Osiander’s view, to the extent that it makes the justifying activity that of all three divine persons, diminishes the salvific value of Christ’s life and death.⁶⁷ So Calvin has good reason

⁶¹ Calvin’s Eucharistic theology underwent many transformations; of interest to me here are merely those later iterations less hospitable to Lutheran views than was Calvin’s thinking in the 1540s. For the development, see Wim Janse, ‘Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations’, in Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.), Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, Reformed Historical Theology, 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 37–69. ⁶² Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 72; Beveridge, II, 279–80. ⁶³ Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 474; Beveridge, II, 513; Reid, 273. ⁶⁴ Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 495; Beveridge, II, 541; Reid, 297; see too Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 72; Beveridge, II, 280; Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, cols. 167, 183, 234; Beveridge, 381, 402, 472. ⁶⁵ Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 504; Beveridge, II, 554, my italics; Reid, 308. ⁶⁶ See e.g. Osiander, De unico (in Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebass, 10 vols (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1975–97), X/1, 145.1–17). For the role of this controversy in the history of the communicatio in Lutheranism—something that I do not have space to deal with properly here—see Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma, 92–123. ⁶⁷ See Calvin, Inst. III, c. 11, §5 (IV, 186.18–31; Battles, I, 730–1). Osiander is quite explicit that the indwelling belongs properly to all three divine persons (see De unico, 131.1–137.19). Osiander’s view is in part the result of a conjunction of two Christological claims: an acceptance of CN-semantics and a rejection of any kind of genus maiestaticum, such that justice is predicated of Christ merely in virtue of belonging to his divine nature. On the former, in relation to the question of justification, see De unico, 209.8–10, 227.18–20; on the latter, see De unico, 201.34–6. Osiander accepts multivolipraesentia (see De unico, 219.27–8); though he accepts too that ‘we cannot find [Christ’s] divine justice outside his human nature’ (De unico, 227.20–1), and that there is a sense in which ‘the human nature in Christ is just because it has divine justice’ (De unico, 227.35–6)—I assume a similar sense to that in which we have divine justice. On the Osiandrian controversy in general, see Timothy J. Wengert, Defending Faith: Lutheran Responses to Andreas Osiander’s Doctrine of Justification, 1551–1559 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

137

from both perspectives to want to associate justifying and sanctifying activity with Christ’s flesh. Key to Calvin’s understanding of the process by which Christ is made present in the Eucharist is the presupposition that Christ’s body is locally present in heaven.⁶⁸ What Calvin argues is that Christ’s body exercises its life-giving power at a distance from its effect: He [viz. Hesshus] charges us with paying more deference to reason than to the word of God. . . . The fact is far otherwise. For what is more repugnant to human reason than that souls, immortal by creation, should derive life from mortal flesh? This we assert. What is less accordant with earthly wisdom, than that the flesh of Christ should infuse its vivifying energy into us from heaven? . . . . What is more remote from philosophy, than that the Son of God, who in respect of human nature is in heaven, so dwells in us, that everything which he been given him of the Father is common to us, and hence the immortality with which his flesh is endowed is ours?⁶⁹

To be ‘life-giving’ is to give immortality to human souls. Christ’s flesh is responsible for doing this, or for having a causal role in it. And in claiming that the flesh of Christ can ‘infuse its vivifying energy into us from heaven’, I take it that Calvin affirms some kind of immediate action at a distance. Overall, however, Calvin is treading a fine line here. As we have seen, part of his worry about the Lutheran view is that omnipresence is incompatible with bodiliness; here he needs his own doctrine nevertheless not to be thus incompatible, and cannot push too hard on the notion that his theology is contrary to reason. (Hesshus wryly comments: ‘Which now seems more astonishing: that we should believe that the body of Christ, by its divine power, is distributed in distinct places, or that the universal Church should acknowledge Christ’s vivifying flesh?’⁷⁰ Calvin is in some danger of undermining his own grounds for objecting to the Lutherans.) Elsewhere, Calvin says a bit more about what the effect of this life-giving activity is: ‘The flesh of Christ becomes vivifying to us, inasmuch as Christ, by the incomprehensible agency of his Spirit, transfuses his own proper life into us from the substance of his flesh, so that he himself lives in us, and his life is common with us.’⁷¹ The idea is that the flesh has some kind of causal role in the exercise of God’s life-giving power. Against Zwingli’s account of the Eucharist, Calvin is serious in thinking of this causal presence as a genuine (extramental) kind of presence. He borrows and ⁶⁸ ‘The entire man Christ remains in heaven’: Calvin, Ult. ad., CR 37, col. 182; Beveridge, II, 401; see too Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 71; Beveridge, II, 278. ⁶⁹ Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 474; Beveridge, II, 512–13; Reid, 273; see too e.g. Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 72; Beveridge, II, 280. See too Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 76; Beveridge, II, 285. ⁷⁰ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Niiv. ⁷¹ Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 38, col. 270; Beveridge, II, 506; Reid, 267.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

138

 

expands on (without saying so) Lombard’s distinction between different kinds of divine presence quoted in Chapter 2. Calvin uses these distinctions to talk about the presence not of immaterial beings but of bodies: It stands fixed, that the Son of God . . . is above with his body. Still, however, he [viz. Westphal] persists, and says that Augustine . . . distinctly affirms the invisible presence. The presence of flesh or of power? If of the flesh, let the passage be produced, and I retire vanquished; but if the flesh is expressly distinguished from grace and virtue, what can be imagined more impudent than Westphal, who assigns that invisible mode of presence properly to the flesh?⁷²

Here Calvin uses three of Lombard’s modes of presence: by flesh (= essence), by power, and by grace. The first of these is spatial presence—by which I here mean bodily presence at a place, whether circumscriptively or definitively. This, of course, is the sense that Calvin wants to exclude. Presence by grace and presence by power are, I take it, equivalent in this case: for Christ’s body to be present by power is for it to give the believer’s soul immortality, and this, presumably, is what it is to be present by grace too. While not a variety of bodily or spatial presence, Calvin is nevertheless clear, as just noted, that this is a kind of real presence. We have already seen Calvin talking in terms of the ‘presence of power’. And he regards this as sufficient to secure in some sense the presence of ‘the substance of his body’ in the bread: ‘Does he who denies that the body of Christ is eaten by the mouth, take away the substance of his body from the sacred Supper?’⁷³ Calvin is likewise serious in having us suppose that this presence is a case of immediate action at a distance: As distance of place seems to be an obstacle, preventing the virtue of Christ’s flesh from reaching us, I explain the difficulty by saying that Christ, without changing place, descends to us by his virtue. . . . I hold that Christ is not present in the Supper in any other way than this—because the minds of believers (this being a heavenly act) are raised by faith above the world, and Christ, by the agency of his Spirit, removing the obstacle which distance of space might occasion, conjoins us with his members.⁷⁴

‘Virtue’ here means power, so ‘descends to us by his virtue’ means ‘causes an effect in us’—in this case, ‘conjoin[ing] us with his members’—making us part of the Church; but also, as we have seen, conferring immortality on our souls. And Calvin ascribes a causal role to ‘Christ’s flesh’ here: it is ‘the virtue of Christ’s flesh’ ⁷² Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, cols. 172–3; Beveridge, II, 388; see Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 71, Beveridge, II, 278, ‘Christ descends to us by his virtue’. For presence by grace, see too Calvin, Ult. ad., CR, 37, col. 170; Beveridge, II, 384; also Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 73; Beveridge, II, 281. ⁷³ Calvin, Dil. exp., CR, 37, col. 470; Beveridge, II, 507; Reid, 268. ⁷⁴ Calvin, Secunda def., CR, 37, col. 72; Beveridge, II, 280.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    

139

that ‘reach[es]’ us, and it does so by reason of Christ’s ‘removing the obstacle which distance of space might occasion’. I have gone into such detail on this matter because I want to be clear about two things: first, that Calvin as much as his opponents is in principle happy to affirm SG-predication; and, secondly, that his being so seems to place him in a similar bind to that in which Westphal might find himself: he ascribes to the human nature of Christ attributes that we might be forgiven for thinking to be incompatible with that nature—in this case, the power to act immediately at a distance in causing a supernatural effect. (I do not know, incidentally, whether Calvin thought of this power as an automatic consequence of the Incarnation or Exaltation, or not: he does not say. I assume its exercise is not, since it is presumably a further matter, from a metaphysical point of view, whether or not God decides to use the flesh in its life-giving capacity.)

3.3.2 Westphal Westphal pushes Calvin on just how the nature of the presence that Calvin defends should be understood, and manages to identify a real ambiguity in Calvin’s position. He tries a number of strategies, admittedly only in passing. At one point, he asserts without argument that action at a distance is impossible: Westphal’s opponent—it could in this case be Zwingli, but it is not possible to say for certain whom he has in mind—claims that Christ’s body is in heaven, and does so with the purpose of securing ‘that it is impossible that Christ acts among us on earth’.⁷⁵ In line with this, Westphal claims, given the impossibility of immediate bodily action at a distance, that Calvin’s view on the Eucharist—according to which it is ‘the agency of the Holy Spirit’ that causes the relevant effects in the Eucharist—gets us the presence of the Holy Spirit, but not Christ or his body;⁷⁶ and, elsewhere, that it gets us the presence of Christ’s divinity, but not the whole Christ.⁷⁷ Finally, Westphal notes that the notion of power, in relation to bodily presence, is in any case ambiguous: As he [viz. Calvin] writes in another place, it is not the substance of the body, or the true and natural body of Christ, that is given, but the benefits which he preestablished for us in his body, so that in this work ‘body’ is interpreted as power (vigorem). For, he says, he so brings us to him, by his Spirit dwelling in us, that he transfuses into us the life-giving power of his body. . . . A little later his adds that Christ, remaining in heaven, descends to us by his power (virtute). For the Church’s belief that Christ gives his body he has substituted that he descends

⁷⁵ Westphal, Adv. sac., 74. ⁷⁷ Westphal, Apol., 251.

⁷⁶ Westphal, Adv. sac., 65–6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

140

 

by his power to us. To give the body is for Christ to descend to us by his power. So he is deceived by an ambiguously used term.⁷⁸

The second part of this quotation does the real work here. The idea is that ‘power’ cannot be corralled into meaning ‘body’. Merely causal presence, in short— presence by power—is not a form of bodily presence, and ‘merely causal’ in this context is what the Scholastics called an alienating adjective—merely causal presence is not presence, just as a dead cat is not a cat.

3.3.3 Hesshus The position of Hesshus is, from the point of view of the dialectic with Calvin, rather more interesting than Westphal’s. Fundamentally, like Westphal, Hesshus does not see how causal presence is a kind of presence at all. As we have seen, he believes that Christ’s human nature sustains all of creation, and he denies that Christ’s human nature is omnipresent. So, unlike Westphal, he apparently accepts action at a distance, or something closely akin to it, but does not think that there is a direct path from causal efficacy to presence. Hesshus argues that if we suppose having a causal effect at a place to be sufficient for presence, then we might be forgiven for supposing that what is present in Christ’s earthly life is just the power of his body: Calvin’s opinion is that it is not the substance of the body but its fruit, power, and efficacy that is communicated to us in the Supper. Whence the most absurd opinion follows, that it is not the body but its power, efficacy, and fruit, or, if you prefer, the spirit of Christ that hung on the cross and died.⁷⁹

The argument is, again, slightly odd: Calvin could well respond that there are other reasons for supposing that Christ was spatially present during his earthly life. (As far as I know, Calvin does not respond to this argument of Hesshus’s.) Still, Hesshus’s position makes it easy to see why he insists that, whatever Calvin may have to say on the matter, Calvin’s position in fact amounts merely to Zwingli’s—there is no account of presence at all.⁸⁰ As Hesshus sees it, even Calvin’s concession that the substance of Christ’s body is in the Eucharist should be understood merely in terms of the genus idiomaticum—that is to say, that ‘Christ’s body is in the Eucharist’ means that the man Christ is in the Eucharist; and what ‘the man Christ is in the Eucharist’ means is that merely the divine person is in the Eucharist.⁸¹ Calvin, of course, would disagree with the interpretation.

⁷⁸ Westphal, Adv. sac., 57–8. ⁸⁰ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Civ.

⁷⁹ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Giir. ⁸¹ Hesshus, De praes., fol. Dviiv.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

4 Lutheran and Reformed Debates in the Early 1560s

I outlined above four stages in Brenz’s Christology. The first three were the subject of part of Chapter 2; the final stage, and its genesis and immediate impact, is the subject of the current chapter. Basically, Brenz does two things: first, he comes to see that the genus maiestaticumB might itself be the explanatory ground for the hypostatic union, and thus that we can appeal to the genus maiestaticumB to solve a gap in his earlier Christology: the absence of any account of the nature of and ground for the hypostatic union itself; and, secondly, he gestures towards a principle on the basis of which the communication of divine attributes can be restricted to just a certain subset of those attributes. (I do not think that the second of these constitutes a distinct ‘phase’, since it simply refines something that, in my analysis, formed the third step in the development of Brenz’s Christology: that is, the restriction of the scope of the genus maiestaticum in order to avoid identity with certain aspects of Schwenckfeld’s position.) The first of these positions Brenz formulates in the 1562 De maiestate, in response to the intervention of Vermigli in the debate in his Dialogus (1561)—specifically, as a reply to Vermigli’s defence of the supposital union. Vermigli died in 1562, and the debate between Brenz and Bullinger, the beginning of which I outlined in Chapter 2, continued unabated. In the Recognitio (1564) Brenz makes the second of the two moves just outlined, building on some hints adumbrated in the De maiestate. By and large, Bullinger’s aptly named Repetitio (his 1564 response to the Recognitio) simply recapitulates earlier material, and does not address what is distinctive about Brenz’s Recognitio. But I consider it below because it includes one novel argument that rather sharply highlights something unresolved in Brenz’s position. And I consider too the reply to Brenz’s Recognitio found in Beza’s perhaps ironically titled Placidum et modestum responsum (1565), which provides the most sustained and extensive criticism of Brenz’s Christology to have emerged in the decade. In a final section, I consider the way in which the view outlined by Brenz was developed and adapted by his close associate Jakob Andreae in the mid1560s, both in his response to Beza—Andreae’s Assertio piae et orthodoxae doctrinae de personali unione—and in the Colloquy of Maulbronn (April 1564), at which Andreae was the main spokesperson for Lutheran theology.

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

142

 

4.1 Vermigli In his earlier works Brenz offers no account of the metaphysics of the hypostatic union itself beyond stating that the two natures are or become one person. We find something very different in Vermigli. Vermigli wrote his Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura (1561) in response to Brenz’s De personali unione, which he not infrequently quotes. Vermigli’s approach is refreshingly clear and pertinent. Vermigli grounds the hypostatic union in the supposital union: ‘Wherever the human nature of Christ may be, it is always borne ( gestatur) and sustained (substinetur) in the divine person’;¹ the divine nature ‘has the humanity inhering (haerentem) and fixed (infixam) in its hypostasis’;² the human nature ‘inheres (inhaeret) in and is sustained (substentatur) by the divine hypostasis’.³ The talk of inherence signals very clearly that Vermigli has Duns Scotus’s non-causal sense of ‘sustain’ in mind, albeit that he uses ‘inheres’ more broadly and loosely than Scotus does. (None of this is surprising: Vermigli trained at the University of Padua, which had chairs in both Thomism and Scotism during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and was the main Italian centre for Scotist teaching.⁴ And in any case Vermigli was well versed in the thought of both Aquinas and Scotus, though admittedly with a general preference for the former.)⁵ Importantly, Vermigli makes an explicit decision on the metaphysical question that I mentioned at the end of the Introduction, and that even a thinker as thorough and meticulous as Scotus arguably leaves unresolved: although human accidents characterize the Word, they are not borne by the Word: ‘the passion and death proceeded from the humanity and were terminated in it since they did not pass through or penetrate the Word itself ’.⁶ In line with this, Vermigli sets out the presuppositions of CN-semantics almost as clearly as Gabriel Biel does, though more briefly: ‘I affirm that these communications are verbal, because the properties cannot in reality pertain to both natures. But they are not verbal in such a way that they should not be conceded and received as true, provided that there is a good reason.’⁷ The idea is that the relevant human attributes truly characterize the Word—‘they are not verbal in such a way that they should not be conceded and received as true’—but are not borne by the Word—‘the communications are

¹ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 13r; Donnelly, 28, slightly altered. ² Vermigli, Dial., fol. 15v; Donnelly, 31. ³ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 19r; Donnelly, 36, slightly altered. ⁴ On Padua in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see most recently Matthew T. Gaetano, ‘Renaissance Thomism at the University of Padua, 1465–1583’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013. ⁵ See John Patrick Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 18 (Leiden: Brill, 1976), ch. 1. ⁶ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 36r; Donnelly, 61, altered. ⁷ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 29r; Donnelly, 51, altered.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         verbal’: just as in CN-semantics. And Vermigli seems to suppose that the relevant locutions are straightforwardly true, and not (e.g.) tropes or metaphors. Vermigli goes to considerable lengths to distinguish his semantics from what he understands to be Brenz’s semantics for hypostasis-predication. Discussing the Cyrilline passage from the Scholia de incarnatione quoted by Brenz (and given above, in section 2.4.2, p. 110), Vermigli comments on two possible interpretations: reading the passage in accordance with his own CN-semantics, and reading it in line with some form of H-semantics, according to which, in Vermigli’s summary, ‘the Son of God . . . suffered and died in the sense that the passion and death sprang from the human nature but nonetheless so that they reached (peruenerint) to the Word itself and reached in such a way that the Word truly suffered and died’.⁸ Vermigli refuses Brenz’s claim that ‘the Word truly and in reality suffered and died’.⁹ As he points out, accepting Brenz’s view yields a contradiction, since ‘the Word is impassible and immutable’.¹⁰ Now, the terminology is a bit difficult, since Vermigli does not possess the language of the neat modern distinction between characterizing (linguistic) and being borne (metaphysical) (though he probably knows the parallel Medieval (and Scotist) one between denominating and depending). It clearly sounds suspicious to say that the Word suffered, but not really, or not truly. But this is just what Vermigli on occasion says, in his anxiety to avoid construing the relevant locutions in line with the semantics of his opponents: Although I deny that the Word really suffered and died, still I do not claim that the passion and death did not involve it at all, for the Word was present at the passion and death, as has been said, because of the hypostatic union, although in a quiescent way. He was not affected by any suffering or by a new quality. Hence it is not empty words that the Son of God suffered and died since that nature and flesh, which he made his own and to which he was present by a union of person, really and truly suffered and died.¹¹

Here, the claim that the Word ‘really’ suffered and died amounts to the claim that these things are borne by the Word, in effect such that the relevant predications are realf—something that Vermigli is anxious to deny. Still, given CN-semantics the relevant predications should come out as true, and, as we have seen, Vermigli is aware of this. Indeed, in his attempts to reject views according to which the divine person bears his human accidents—and thus to reject the view that those accidents are borne by the divine person (‘reach’ the divine person, in Vermigli’s terminology)—Vermigli seems to be the first to have identified explicitly a very ⁸ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 35v–36r; Donnelly, 61. The way Vermigli puts the matter makes it look more like a case of LH-semantics than BH-semantics. But this is no surprise: Vermigli, like Luther and unlike Brenz, is thinking in the context of an acceptance of the supposital union. ¹⁰ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 36r; Donnelly, 61. ⁹ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 35v; Donnelly, 61. ¹¹ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 35v; Donnelly, 59–60.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

144

 

significant point of divergence between our various theologians, one that I have been highlighting in my account thus far: namely, the distinction between CNsemantics and some form of H-semantics for the genus idiomaticum. I pointed out in section 1.2.1.1, p. 62, that Luther interprets Chalcedon’s inseparability requirement as entailing two-way spatial inseparability, and noted that there is no obvious reason to think that the principal premise in Luther’s inference (i.e. IBS) is persuasive. Vermigli puts his finger on exactly what has gone wrong: As far as I know, nobody has either imagined or taught that the hypostatic union enables the body of Christ to be everywhere. But if my statements do not seem very clear to you, I will not disdain illustrating them with some analogies. . . . Examine a tree with me: you will recognize in the same single object, not in the least divided or cut up, a root, a trunk, and branches. But the root does not have to be found everywhere the tree exists because the nature of the tree is in both the trunk and the branches, even though the root is not where the branches are. . . . [This] illustrates that unity is not divided simply because the parts are in different places. Besides, to make the question still more clear, let us examine the human body. It is certainly a single object, and it parts do not possess a different hypostasis. But that does not require that the feet be where the head is, nor the heart be where the feet are. Therefore union in the same hypostasis does not abolish diversity of location.¹²

In short: hypostatic union does not require that all the parts exist where the whole does. (Compare Calvin’s claim that the whole Christ does not have to be wholly present.)¹³ As Vermigli sees it, the doctrine of omnipresence involves thinking of Christ ‘as if the whole of the divine nature is included in the human’,¹⁴ which strikes Vermigli as a kind of miaphysitism, ‘confus[ing] and mix[ing] the properties and natures in Christ’.¹⁵ Later, Vermigli claims that it is straightforwardly a kind of monophysitism, simply obliterating the human nature: ‘To want the man to so exist that he be immense, infinite, and unlimited, what is this but to deny that he is truly a man?’¹⁶ A lot depends on what properties one believes a

¹² Vermigli, Dial., fol. 10v; Donnelly, 24–5, slightly altered. ¹³ Willis gives a number of other Reformed analogies aimed at undermining two-way bodily inseparability, more or less relevant to the case: see his Calvin’s Catholic Christology, 15–16. Bullinger later on adds one of his own: ‘Wherever a pregnant woman is . . . there she has her foetus conjoined to her, even though it is not in her head, or hands, or feet’ (Bullinger, Repetitio et dilucidior explicatio consensus veteris orthodoxae catholicaeque Christi Ecclesiae (Zurich, 1564), fol. 52r). The parts of a body do not have to be where the whole body is, or even where any other part of the body is. (Bullinger here presupposes, incidentally, that the foetus is a part of the mother, not a person in its own right. I assume this was the standard view.) ¹⁵ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 9v; Donnelly, 23. ¹⁴ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 9v; Donnelly, 23. ¹⁶ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 20v; Donnelly, 39.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         human nature to be susceptible of. And, clearly, Vermigli and Brenz are in genuine disagreement on this issue. Vermigli has a well-developed account of SG-possession, which he describes in terms of the communication of divine attributes (not, of course, in the Brenzian sense): ‘I confess that immortality, light, glory, and so forth, which human nature is capable of receiving, are communicated to him, but other attributes such as eternity, immensity, and ubiquity, since the human nature cannot receive them, cannot be communicated to him.’¹⁷ And elsewhere he adds that ‘the flesh of Christ is life-giving’, and the object of ‘adoration’,¹⁸ and that the human nature receives ‘glory’, ‘happiness’, and ‘the power of performing miracles’.¹⁹ In this, he seems wholly traditional—though strongly against Zwingli’s apparent refusal of any such attributes to the human nature.

4.2 Brenz’s Late Christology The final stage in the development of Brenz’s Christology includes two components: a reconceptualization of his two-stage UC-ordering in order to give some kind of explanation of the union of natures; and an attempt, as influential as it was desultory, find some kind of principle on the basis of which the divine attributes can be divided into two groups—communicated ones and non-communicated ones. I deal with these two issues in turn.

4.2.1 Brenz on the Metaphysics of Union Brenz’s De maiestate, written in 1562, in part as a response to Vermigli’s text, takes explicit issue with the supposital union defended by Vermigli. Melanchthon defends this view too, as we have seen. But it seems to have been Vermigli’s attack that was the catalyst for Brenz’s discussion of it. At one point, Brenz raises very clearly what becomes the central question in his later Christology: ‘The Son of God joined to himself the son of the Virgin Mary in unity of person, and did not join to himself in this way Peter or Paul. . . . But what is this: “in unity of person” ’?²⁰ We have already seen Vermigli’s response to this question: the union of natures is explained by the supposital union. But Brenz does not believe that there is anything unique about supposital union. Supposital

¹⁷ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 28v; Donnelly, 50. On the later development of the Reformed distinction between communicable and incommunicable attributes, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), III, 223–6. ¹⁹ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 46r; Donnelly, 76. ¹⁸ Vermigli, Dial., fol. 45v; Donnelly, 75. ²⁰ Brenz, De maiest., 226.15–17.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

146

 

union consists in God’s presence to, and sustaining, a created substance, and to this extent every created substance is suppositally united to God: ‘It is sufficient’, Martyr says of Christ, for the deity (even though it is immense and infinite) to support ( fulcire) and sustain (sustentare) the humanity, by its hypostasis, wherever it was’. And in this way also the Son of God supports and sustains, by his hypostasis (since he is the second hypostasis in one deity) the humanity of Paul, wherever it was. For the humanity of Paul cannot even for one moment persist (consistere) or be conserved unless it is supported and sustained by divine power and presence.²¹

Brenz even asserts that all human beings have two natures in this sense: they are human natures—and thus human beings, on Brenz’s semantics—sustained by the divine person.²² I assume that this claim is supposed to be counterfactual, a reductio of Vermigli’s position, though Brenz does not make it quite clear: if sustaining (of the relevant kind) is sufficient for hypostatic union, as (on Brenz’s reading) his opponents assert, then it will follow that, since all human beings are sustained in the relevant way, all human beings will have two natures, one human, one divine. In line with the perichoretic approach adumbrated in the 1561 treatises (discussed in Chapter 2), Brenz in effect construes supposital union itself as a kind of perichoresis. God’s presence to the universe is causal, and supposital union is not any special kind of divine presence over and above this. Thus, as Brenz sees it, the supposital union mistakenly reduces Christology to the theology of creation—of general dependence on God’s causal activity. Now, Vermigli is very clear that the supposital union should not be so interpreted, and from his rather Scotist perspective Brenz’s objection would miss its mark. We find Brenz’s way of understanding the supposital-union theory suggested by some things Melanchthon says, as I noted in section 2.2.2, p. 91—so it was probably Brenz’s reading of this theologian that caused him to interpret the theory in the way that he did.²³ Still, on this understanding of the supposital union, it is clearly ill-suited to constitute some kind of explanation for the hypostatic union. In line with his perichoretic account of the Incarnation, Brenz comes to characterize the union itself in terms of communication of the deity, along with its properties, to the ²¹ Brenz, De maiest., 222.3–9. ²² Brenz, Recognitio propheticae et apostolicae doctrinae de vera maiestate Domini nostri Jesu Christi, de dextera Dei Patri omnipotentis (Tübingen, 1564), 15. In the Recognitio, Brenz responds to an opponent who suggests that assumption is sufficient to distinguish the case of Christ from that of other human persons by suggesting that there is a sense of ‘assumption’ in which to be assumed is simply to be a nature dependent on God and such that God ‘creates, vivifies and conserves it’: Brenz, Recognitio, 16. ²³ It is a matter for some regret that Brenz’s mistake is repeated in modern literature on the supposital union: see for example, Mahlmann, ‘Personeinheit Jesu mit Gott: Interpretation der Zweinaturenlehre in den christologischen Schriften des alten Brenz’, Blätter für württemburgische Kirchengeschichte, 70 (1970), 176–265 (pp. 215, 218).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         humanity. Underlying this approach, found in the 1564 Recognitio, is Brenz’s Augustinianism on the question of the identity of the divine essence and attributes. He ascribes the view he defends to the ‘dialectici’:²⁴ God is identical with each and every one of his attributes: ‘God is omnipotence itself, goodness itself, justice itself, life itself, happiness itself, presence itself, and essence itself.’²⁵ The first step in the argument is the identification of the hypostatic union or sameness* of person with the genus maiestaticumB: Since the assumed man is elevated into a majesty than which there cannot be any greater or more sublime, it is necessary that he is also elevated to maximal power, which is omnipotence, and maximal height (altitudinem), which is omnipresence. This is what the Incarnation means (vult).²⁶

Incarnation—the majesty of the human nature—‘means’ that the assumed man (the human nature) is omnipresent and omnipotent: the Incarnation consists in the human nature’s possession of these attributes, and just as omnipotence (‘maximal power’) is a divine attribute, so too, according to Brenz, is omnipresence (‘maximal height’).²⁷ But, as Brenz comes to see, the identity of the divine essence and attributes provides a grounding for equating the communication of the deity with the genus maiestaticumB, and thus a way for the genus maiestaticumB to be explanatorily sufficient for sameness* of person. Brenz’s central characterization of the relevant relation is found in the context of a complex exegesis of the crucial Scriptural passage, Col. 2:7: Here, [Paul] is talking about personal indwelling, that is, about the indwelling of the deity, which is communicated, by the Son of God or Logos, to the Son of Man. Paul therefore says about this that ‘all the fullness of the deity indwells the man Christ corporeally’. He does not simply say, ‘the deity indwells him’, or simply say ‘the fullness of the deity [indwells him]’. But he says ‘all, all’, I say, ‘the fullness of the deity’. And he adds ‘corporeally’, that is, ‘not in a shadowy way (non umbraliter)’, as in other creatures. . . . In the man Christ, it is not that some mere part of the deity is adumbrated (adumbratur), but the deity is set loose (absoluitur) in him most perfectly: that is, it is communicated to him [viz. the man Christ] in all its fullness. And in all the perfect fullness of God is contained not only omnipotence, but also omni-sapience, omniscience, omni-justice, omni-felicity, and omnipresence.²⁸

²⁴ Brenz, Recognitio, 61. ²⁵ Brenz, Recognitio, 61. ²⁶ Brenz, Recognitio, 58–9. ²⁷ Brandy, Brenz’s most important modern commentator, reads Brenz as coming to treat the communicatio idiomatum (construed as the genus maiestaticum) as ‘constitutive’ of the personal union (Brandy, Die späte Christologie, 168, n. 50). I would want to say that the genus maiestaticum explains how it is true that the divine nature, absolutely identical with the divine attributes, is united to the human nature. But I shall not insist on this point in my discussion below, since it would require too much attention to a relatively insignificant detail. ²⁸ Brenz, Recognitio, 46–7. I italicize the second ‘all’ to correspond to Brenz’s use of capital letters.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

148

 

Here we have the indwelling in the human nature (‘the man Christ’) of the divine essence along with the various attributes, treated as one moment in the Incarnation. If we read this text in conjunction with the first step of the argument, we might reasonably conclude the idea to be that the identity of divine nature and attributes means that the communication of divine attributes results in the communication of the divine nature. Just as the human nature comes to bear divine attributes, the human nature becomes the same* person as the divine person: thus ‘the deity . . . is communicated by the Son of God . . . to the Son of Man’. What it is for the deity to be ‘set loose’ in the man Christ is for the (relevant) divine attributes to be possessed by him. (Note, incidentally, that Brenz’s reading of the Pauline text is quite different from Luther’s (examined in section 1.2.1.1, p. 61). Luther sees the text as supporting IBS; Brenz sees it as supporting BMP and Brenzian communciatio.) Brenz relates this insight to his discrimen argument: what distinguishes ‘Christ from any other man’ is the genus maiestaticumB, and this is the reason why ‘the Son of Mary and the Son of God’ do not ‘constitute two persons’—and thus is the explanation for their constituting one person.²⁹ The appeal of such an account is that the genus maiestaticumB can help solve a theoretical gap in a perichoretic account of the hypostatic union. The identity of the divine essence and attributes means that the divine essence can come to be united to the human nature, and thus present in it, in virtue of the human nature’s possession of divine attributes. As I noted above, Brenz takes complete spatial coincidence to be necessary for sameness* of person. But of course it cannot be sufficient: the whole universe is completely spatially coincident with the divine person, and no one would suppose on those grounds that they constitute one hypostasis. We shall see in a moment an analogous argument from complete spatial coincidence proposed, against Brenz, by Beza. What the new insight provides is a way for spatial coincidence to be part of a set of conditions that can be seen as sufficient for sameness* of person— namely, the genus maiestaticumB. The identity of essence and attribute in God means that the communication of the attributes eo ipso secures the communication of the essence, and thus that the divine and human substances are the same* person. Sameness* of person (i.e. the hypostatic union of the natures) and the genus maiestaticumB are, given Augustinianism, co-extensive, and given that the divine essence contains all (and only) the divine attributes, we might think of the first stage of the UC-ordering Brenz accepts in this text as looking like this: (sameness* of person = genus maiestaticumB), which yields the following picture of the whole two-stage explanatory UC-ordering: ((sameness* of person = genus maiestaticumB) → hypostasis-as-subject).³⁰ (Contrast the earlier view: (sameness*of

²⁹ Brenz, Recognitio, 17.

³⁰ For a summary of different views, see Table 1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         person → (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticumB)).) The revised account very neatly achieves something that Brenz’s earlier account left mysterious: it explains the communion of natures construed perichoretically (in terms of the genus maiestaticumB, the communication of divine attributes to the human nature). This is the result of the Augustinian insight that the divine essence and attributes are inseparable. And as in his earlier Christology, the stipulation that we count property bearers by sameness* as opposed to identity allows the hypostatic union to explain the genus idiomaticum too. Whatever the merits of his theory, Brenz has an answer to the question that he set out to solve: namely, the discrimen question, the way in which the metaphysics of the Incarnation is different from the metaphysics of general dependence. In the case of the Incarnation, and in no other instance, the assumed man receives (some or all) of the ipsissima divine attributes.

4.2.2 Brenz on the Communicated Attributes As we have seen, a Reformed objection to the Lutheran view is that divine attributes are proper to God, and thus cannot be communicated to creatures. In De maiestate, Brenz cites Augustine to the effect that ‘the communicating or participating divinity is one thing, and the communicated or participated divinity another’.³¹ In line with his claim that the communicated attributes are identical with the divine attributes, Brenz cannot mean that the participated divinity is a kind of replica God. Elsewhere he understands the Augustinian claim simply to amount to an assertion of the human nature’s possession of certain divine attributes. Commenting on Phil. 2:6 (‘ “Christ”, [Paul] says, “since he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God” ’),³² Brenz notes: In this verse from Paul, the phrase ‘form of God’ is to be taken for the properties, conditions, and ornaments of the deity, with which the Son of Man, whom the Son of God assumed in one person, was, on account of the personal union, adorned. Therefore the man Christ had for himself from the beginning of the Incarnation this ‘participated divinity’ (as Augustine says), or ‘equality with God’ (as Paul says), so that he might be truly omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise (omnisapiens), all-just, and omnipresent.³³

(A characteristic manifestation of Brenzian communicatio—here making plain the assumption that having an attribute is sufficient for the attribute’s being predicated. And note that the potentially rogue phrase ‘equality with God’ is here

³¹ Brenz, De maiest., 340.21–2, referring to Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione, I, c. 31, n. 60 (ed. C. F. Vrba and I. Zycha, CSEL, 60 (Vienna: Tempsky; Leipzig: Freytag, 1913), 61.12–13). ³² Brenz, De maiest., 322.26–7. ³³ Brenz, De maiest., 322.30–324.6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

150

 

sanitized by association with Paul.) But Brenz says no more on the matter. In the Recognitio, however, he considers the objection in greater detail. Basically, Brenz comes to see that the communicated attributes are those to do with divine activity. In an oft-quoted passage, Brenz proposes a set of three contrasts to explain what he has in mind: ‘We do not make the humanity of Christ equal to the divinity in οὐσίᾳ but only in ἐξουσίᾳ, not in essence but in power, not in nature but in glory, not in substance but in majesty.’³⁴ (‘Ἐξουσία’ is, I take it, a reference to Mt 28:18.) Underlying the choice of language here is a worry that Brenz’s position simply amounts to Schwenckfeld’s view that the human nature becomes the equal of the divine. I take it that what Brenz has in mind is that the human nature comes to be the subject not of the divine essence (and nature and substance), but of divine power (and glory and majesty). I assume that, as in his earlier accounts, the human nature is such that it bears divine attributes—specifically, divine powers—without being identical with them: ‘the human nature has this [viz. omnipotence] communicated by the divinity, so that it is truly omnipotent and omnipresent, but [is] not the divinity—that is, omnipotence and omnipresence itself ’.³⁵ At first glance, this distinction is inconsistent with Brenz’s argument on the explanation for sameness* of person outlined in the previous subsection, and there is certainly a sense in which Augustinianism, which Brenz appealed to in support of this explanation, tends to undermine his attempt to avoid falling into Schwenckfeld’s position. But we can go some way towards mitigating this tension if suppose that the human nature’s bearing an attribute (rather than being identical with it) is sufficient for its union with something identical with that attribute (viz. the divine essence), without that union requiring that the human nature is in any sense identical with the divine essence. This, I take it, is part of Brenz’s point in the contrast between equality in essence and equality in power. This account, then, requires the human nature to bear divine powers. As we shall see in this subsection and in section 4.4.1, some of Brenz’s successors came to read this text—which was frequently quoted—in a very different way, claiming that the nature possesses not the divine powers as such but simply divine activities. But this latter view is not Brenz’s, as we can see by considering what he says about Christ’s earthly state. The main discussion takes as its starting point the exegesis of Phil. 2:6 with which I started this subsection. As we saw there, Brenz understands Paul’s ‘being in the form of God’ to signify the human nature’s being ‘omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise (omnisapiens), all-just, and omnipresent’.³⁶ What happens during Christ’s earthly life is that the man Christ did not ‘manifestly exercise’³⁷ or ‘use’³⁸ these powers, or ‘show them publicly, whether in heaven or on earth’.³⁹ The ³⁴ Brenz, Recognitio, 63. ³⁵ Brenz, Recognitio, 62. ³⁶ Brenz, De maiest., 324.5–6. ³⁷ Brenz, De maiest., 324.23. ³⁸ Brenz, De maiest. 324.31–2. ³⁹ Brenz, De maiest., 324.23–4.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         idea is not that the human nature did not in fact exercise these powers: it is that the exercise was concealed: ‘Although he possessed that majesty, he hid (texit) and covered (obduxit) it with the form of a slave.’⁴⁰ And this concealment consists in Christ’s being genuinely the subject of apparent human ills, seemingly incompatible with the possession of a majestic humanity (Brenz mentions pain, fear,⁴¹ ignorance, the need for food, hunger, thirst,⁴² death).⁴³ This is a kryptic theory according to which what is concealed is the exercise of the various divine powers in the human nature (and thereby their possession too). As various passages quoted make clear, these attributes can of course be predicated of the man Christ during his earthly life.⁴⁴ Given that power-exercise here seems to be a requirement for the linguistic genus maiestaticumB, Brenz apparently endorses the following variant of BGM-semantics, explicitly adding power-exercise to the earlier principle: BGM*-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the human nature h bears Φdness, and h exercises Φd-ness’; and (h bears Φd-ness, and h exercises Φd-ness) iff h is the same* person as the divine person. It may indeed be that this is what Brenz always held. If we turn back to the very first discussions of the issue, set out in Chapter 2, we find some explicit mention of activity. But it is hard to be sure. Brandy worries that ‘Brenz has no theory of the dispensing with the use of the majesty’,⁴⁵ and that ‘the relationship between “non usurpare” [i.e. “fail to use”] and “dissimulare” [i.e. “disguise”] is nowhere explained’.⁴⁶ The problem is a bit deeper and more general than this, however. Brenz is clear that the powers are used but not revealed during Christ’s earthly life. But should we understand the predication of divine attributes to be grounded generally in power-possession (as in BGM-semantics) or power-exercise (as in BGM*-semantics)? The issue can be nicely focused if we think about different putatively shared divine attributes. Consider three basic ones: omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. On the face of it, predication in the case of the first two should track power-exercise, or something akin to it: a mere power to be omnipresent or omniscient would not be sufficient for the truth of predications asserting omnipresence or omniscience. I take it that Brenz would claim both that the human nature possesses the relevant powers and that is exercises them too. Omnipotence, however, seems to be a different matter: on the face of it we would predicate omnipotence of a being that could cause or sustain anything even if that being was not in fact bringing about anything at all. Thus in this case power-possession without power-exercise would ⁴⁰ ⁴² ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶

Brenz, De maiest., 326.23–4. ⁴¹ Brenz, De maiest., 328.23–4. Brenz, De maiest., 328.5–6. ⁴³ Brenz, De maiest., 328.34. For a summary, see Tables 2 and 3. Brandy, Späte Christologie, 223; Brandy’s italics. Brandy, Späte Christologie, 222.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

152

 

seem to be sufficient for predication. But I assume, in line with his view that the relevant powers are both possessed and exercised—albeit kryptically—that Brenz would require power-exercise in this case too. One other detail of Brenz’s view needs to be addressed. According to Brenz, participation in various divine attributes is global to humanity and to believers: the difference between Christ and other cases is simply one of degree: God created everything to participate in his goodness, and chiefly he created man to participate in his wisdom, justice, and happiness, and whom he thus created he also made with a capacity for these goods, to the extent that he willed. And he willed, indeed, that some human beings—who believed in Christ the Son of God—would be made participants in the divine nature, and, as Peter says, κοινωνιοὶ, partakers (consortes) of the divine nature, each according to his measure. But he willed the man Christ, on account of whom all other things were created, to be χωρητικὸν καὶ κοινωνὸν, susceptible of, and participant in, all of his goods without any measure.⁴⁷

Again, this leaves unanswered as many questions as it solves. The participated attributes in non-Christological cases cannot be the divine attributes themselves, since these do not come in degrees. Neither do they seem obviously divisible in such a way as to be possessed in part, as it were. Brenz’s own intellectual dispositions and inclinations do not seem apt to allow him to have approached the issue with the kind of systematic precision that one might have liked.

4.3 Reformed Responses: Bullinger and Beza 4.3.1 Bullinger In his Repetitio, written in response to Brenz’s revised view of the metaphysics of union, Bullinger strongly rejects Brenz’s claim that all human beings ‘have two natures’, divine and human (though, as I have suggested, it is likely that Brenz means this only counterfactually).⁴⁸ Bullinger holds that the human soul is infinite and the human body finite, but that we would not on those grounds suppose that soul and body do not constitute one person, or are such that they are not co-located.⁴⁹ Equally, he attempts to show that creaturely omnipresence is not sufficient for Incarnation. He considers a counterinstance inspired by Jerome (c. 347–420), according to whom the resurrected bodies of the saved might be omnipresent: they are where the Lamb (i.e. Christ) is, and the Lamb is

⁴⁷ Brenz, Recognitio, 76. ⁴⁸ Bullinger, Repetitio et dilucidior explicatio consensus veteris orthodoxae catholicaeque Christi Ecclesiae (Zurich, 1564), fol. 52v. ⁴⁹ Bullinger, Repetitio, fol. 52r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         everywhere.⁵⁰ So on Brenz’s reasoning, according to which bodily omnipresence is sufficient for incarnation, they must all be hypostatically united to the divine person. Bullinger here in effect turns the tables on Brenz’s claim that if the supposital-union theory is true, then all human beings are divine persons.

4.3.2 Beza Beza works through Brenz’s Recognitio page by page, and offers refutations of almost every point Brenz makes. He adopts something of a scattergun approach to Brenz’s Christology—accusing him, for example, of both Nestorianism and Eutychianism⁵¹—and his criticisms are not always consistent with each other. But he is not merely captious, and overall what he says is germane and incisive. Beza understands the core dynamics of Brenz’s Christology better than Brenz’s other opponents: in particular, he sees that at its heart lies Brenzian communicatio. And he believes that a confusion of the referents of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’ has led Brenz astray. As he puts it at one point, ‘we are not accustomed to say, without any explanation, that the Son of Man was assumed by the Son of God’.⁵² Later Beza complains that Brenz wrongly supposes the Reformed theologians to deny that the man Christ is subject to divine attributes on the grounds that they deny that the human nature is subject to such attributes: Because you make no distinction (discrimen) between ‘man’ and ‘human nature’, for this reason you think that, because we do not attribute (tribuimus) [divine properties] to the human nature alone and considered in itself, we also withdraw them from the man. But this is false.⁵³

Here, Beza sees exactly the structure of Brenzian communicatio, and identifies precisely the nub of the difference between Brenz’s view and that of his opponents. Elsewhere, Beza tersely summarizes the difference between Brenzian communicatio and other views: ‘You wish that the flesh of Christ is adorned with all the properties of the divinity; we wish to unite it to the divine essence of the Son, so that one and the same thing [viz. the person] is essentially God and man.’⁵⁴ And Beza attempts to find an acceptable sense of the traditional language of an ‘assumed man’, by glossing it such that it should be understood to refer to the human nature in abstracto: ‘the flesh [i.e. the human nature] began to be the flesh of God’⁵⁵—just as we saw Luther do a quarter of a century earlier. ⁵⁰ Jerome, Adversus Vigilantium, c. 6 (ed. J.-L. Freiertag, CCSL, 89C (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 14.10–11). ⁵¹ Beza, Plac. resp., 146–7. ⁵² Beza, Ad Domini Joannis Brentii argumenta . . . placidum et modestum responsio (Geneva, 1565), 78; see too p. 8. ⁵³ Beza, Plac. resp., 157. ⁵⁴ Beza, Plac. resp., 152. ⁵⁵ Beza, Plac. resp., 416.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

154

 

Beza has a knack of finding weak points in Brenz’s Christology and pushing on them with sometimes considerable pressure. His basic worry is that the genus maiestaticumB cannot constitute the hypostatic union. First of all, it is not clear that the conferral of divine gifts on a nature has anything to do with union. Giving something or someone gifts, or, specifically, conferring on a nature divine attributes, is not the same as being united to that thing. If anything, this kind of conferral might follow union, already constituted in some other way.⁵⁶ Secondly, as Brenz allows, God confers a share of his nature on a far wider group of things than just Christ’s human nature; and, Beza avers, if this share is of a lesser degree in non-Christological cases, Brenz will need to affirm that the difference between Christ and (e.g.) the saints is just a matter of degree: another version of the Nestorian heresy.⁵⁷ Equally, Beza reasons, if Peter were to share the divine attributes in just the way that Christ’s human nature does, all that we could say is that Peter is a human being adorned with divine majesty—not that God became incarnate as Peter.⁵⁸ Beza spends some time considering Brenz’s claim, ‘We do not make the humanity of Christ equal to the divinity in οὐσίᾳ but only in ἐξουσίᾳ, not in essence but in power, not in nature but in glory, not in substance but in majesty,’ discussed in section 4.2.2.⁵⁹ As Beza sees it, this concession further assimilates the case of Christ’s human nature to the saints: If the assumed man is not omnipotence itself, but simply omnipotent by the participation of power (virtutis), and for merely this reason is God (for I have posited [for the sake of argument] a distinction (discrimen) between Christ and Peter in this one thing), what does Christ have in which he surpasses the saints? For Peter himself writes that all the saints are made participant in the divine nature [see II Pt 1:4], which, since it is impious to understand to be about the communication of the essence, we must necessarily refer to the distribution of powers and gifts. But, you say, we do not receive all the properties, but just some. Therefore, Brenz, we differ from Christ [merely] according to more and less.⁶⁰

Again, Beza is attempting to reduce the difference between Christ and the saints to one of degree—and thus to read Brenz as though he is a Nestorian. He notes that simple participation in divine attributes, as proposed in II Pt 1:4, does not and should not lead to the participant’s literally being God. And thirdly, the communicated properties are common to the three persons of the Trinity. So, Beza wonders, if the communication of such properties constitutes the hypostatic union, how could we avoid the conclusion that all three persons are incarnate?⁶¹ (This argument against Brenz is repeated both by the Wittenberg

⁵⁶ See Beza, Plac. resp., 42, 152, 248–9. ⁵⁷ See Beza, Plac. resp., 18–19, 42–3, 248–9. ⁵⁸ See Beza, Plac. resp., 43. ⁵⁹ Beza quotes the text at Plac. resp., 170–1. ⁶⁰ Beza, Plac. resp., 174–5. ⁶¹ See Beza, Plac. resp., 86; also pp. 41, 134.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         theologians in 1574 and by Chemnitz in 1578, all of whom, as we shall see in Chapter 6, agree with Beza on the matter.) In any case, Beza has various objections to the coherence of the genus maiestaticum as such. First, it results in the obliteration of the human nature—a criticism which Beza does not argue for so much as assert: ‘To say that the Logos has adorned the assumed flesh with all—all—all the gifts without exception, as Brenz says, is plainly a Eutychian dogma.’⁶² (Beza is clearly paraphrasing a text from Brenz I quoted above. But Brenz’s ‘all the fullness of the deity’ is not quite the same as ‘all the gifts without exception’.) Secondly, Beza does not see how something finite could have or possess an infinite property such as a divine attribute;⁶³ thirdly, he does not see how the genus maiestaticum could avoid (absurdly) making the human nature eternal in the past: something that, as we have seen, Brenz denies;⁶⁴ and, fourthly, Beza claims that Brenzian communicatio—since it extends from the Incarnation onwards—precludes Christ’s (further) exaltation.⁶⁵ (The argument is counterfactual and merely ad hominem, since Beza of course does not construe the Exaltation in terms of the reception of divine attributes.) Finally, there is according to Beza no theologically or philosophically acceptable account of the way in which divine attributes can be communicated to the human nature. Beza’s argument proceeds by considering all the possible ways in which the divine nature could be communicated to the human nature: as the whole essence; as a substantial form; as an accidental form.⁶⁶ If the first, ‘then the essence of God was not united to the flesh, but poured out (effusa) into it, and thus this flesh was made God’⁶⁷—that is to say, the essence of God was communicated to the human nature in the way that it is communicated to the second person of the Trinity. If the second—such that the divine attributes are something like the substantial form of the human nature—then it would seem that all three divine persons were incarnate.⁶⁸ And if the third, then the man is only accidentally God.⁶⁹ These arguments attempt to rebut Brenz’s view. Like Calvin, Beza offers too various undermining arguments against his opponents. First of all, the IBS principle (and the relevant instance of GMP) is false, since the move from union to IBS is open to counterexamples. For example, suppose the soul is fully present in each part of the body. It follows that the soul is present where a part of the body is absent (e.g. it is present in the liver, where the ears are not). But we would not on that ground claim that the soul and body failed to constitute ⁶² Beza, Plac. resp., 41–2; see 46. It is not clear to me that this is an accurate presentation of Brenz’s later view of the genus maiestaticum. ⁶³ See Beza, Plac. resp., 62–3. ⁶⁴ See Beza, Plac. resp., 28. ⁶⁵ See Beza, Plac. resp., 249–50. ⁶⁶ A substantial form is unified set of necessary or essential properties that unites with matter to constitute a material substance. ⁶⁷ Beza, Plac. resp., 117. ⁶⁸ See Beza, Plac. resp., 117–18. ⁶⁹ See Beza, Plac. resp., 118; see too p. 136.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

156

 

one thing.⁷⁰ Neither is complete spatial coincidence sufficient for union. Beza considers the case of the someone possessed by a demon: the demon, according to Beza, fully interpenetrates the person, but nevertheless we would not say that the demon and the human constitute one substance.⁷¹ Union is more than mere perichoretic presence. Secondly, Beza believes that the genus maiestaticum rests on a misreading of Chalcedon’s claim that the properties of the natures are preserved in the union.⁷² At issue is the following clause in the creed: ‘at no point was the difference between the natures taken away’. Brenz summarizes the relevant text as follows: ‘at no point . . . was the essence of the natures taken away (nusquam . . . sublata essentia naturarum)’.⁷³ Beza offers a corrective, on the basis of the Greek text, which he quotes: You see that for ‘essence (οὐσίαν)’, which you have written, I have written ‘διαφορὰν φύσεων (difference of natures)’. And then it needed to be considered why the orthodox Fathers used the name of ‘φύσεως’ [i.e. ‘nature’] rather than of ‘οὐσίας’ [i.e. essence] in this argument. For even if the name ‘nature’ is συνώνυμον [i.e. synonymous] with ‘essence’, nevertheless common use shows that ‘φύσιν’ [i.e. ‘nature’] is distinguished from ‘οὐσίᾳ’ [i.e. ‘essence’] such that, beyond matter, and indeed existence itself (esse ipsum), it includes specific forms themselves . . . And human nature itself comprises not only a corporeal and a spiritual essence, but also its ἰδιότητας, its propria.⁷⁴

The idea is that Chalcedon uses ‘nature’ rather than ‘essence’ because a nature is an essence along with its propria: it is the essence (the defining features of a kind) along with other necessary or generally necessary properties which follow from the kind as defined: things which Beza describes as ‘substantial properties’—necessary accidents or propria.⁷⁵ Brenz’s ‘essence of the natures’ suggests that what is preserved are merely the defining features of the kind, the essence; everything else, propria and contingent accidents, is fair game for obliteration. We have already seen this argument at work in both Brenz and Westphal. Beza holds that being in a place is such a substantial property, as likewise is being visible relative to colour—thereby on two counts excluding the possibility of omnipresence.⁷⁶ Beza’s own account of the union has it that the Word makes the human nature his own (propriam).⁷⁷ Beza does not explain how this might be—for example, by appealing to the supposital union (something he does later, as we shall see

⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷² ⁷³ ⁷⁴ ⁷⁵ ⁷⁷

See Beza, Plac. resp., 17. See Beza, Plac. resp., 19–20, 43–4. The case he has in mind is Mk. 6:1–20 and parallels. Which Beza quotes at Plac. resp., 35. Beza, Plac. resp., 34, quoting Brenz, De pers. unione, 16.24–5. Beza, Plac. resp. 35; see too pp. 10–11. Beza, Plac. resp., 37. ⁷⁶ For place, see Beza, Plac. resp., 35; for visibility, see p. 205. See Beza, Plac. resp., 44, 91.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         in Chapter 7). But he believes that the soul–body model offers some help: the soul makes the body its own,⁷⁸ in some unspecified or unknown way,⁷⁹ but such as to constitute something essentially one.⁸⁰ So there are unions available in the metaphysical landscape that resemble the Incarnation sufficiently closely to provide some illumination. In line with his rejection of the view that the genus maiestaticumB might constitute the hypostatic union, Beza is clear that there is a rigid distinction between Christological predication in concreto and in abstracto. He argues that Brenz has failed to understand that we do not predicate of the natures, in abstracto, what we predicate of the person in concreto.⁸¹ And he gives many examples of legitimate predications in concreto,⁸² including the claim that Christ is everywhere.⁸³ But what is not legitimate, according to Beza, is to infer from ‘Christ is everywhere’ that ‘the humanity of Christ is everywhere’: ‘Christ is not immediately divided by those who do not concede to the parts what they attribute to the whole.’⁸⁴ So note Beza’s recognition of Brenz’s adherence to BMP—which principle Beza here rejects. Brenz’s ‘majestic’ biblical texts all apply not to the human nature but to the divine person, in concreto.⁸⁵ Exceptions are adoration and vivification: there is one adoration of the whole Christ,⁸⁶ and Christ’s flesh is life-giving because it belongs to the Word.⁸⁷ There is nothing much surprising here: Beza was Calvin’s successor as leader of the Church in Geneva, and what he says is in conformity with Calvin’s view, albeit expressed with much greater rigour. Neither is it surprising to learn that Beza accepts CN-semantics for all of the locutions I have been discussing: ‘God is said to be born, suffer, die, be buried and so on, which are all nevertheless human, not divine. Why so, indeed? Because he has united to himself personally—that is has made proper to himself—that thing to which all these things properly pertain.’⁸⁸ And Beza insists that ‘the body of Christ is not everywhere’ is a legitimate formulation.⁸⁹ Overall, there is little here that could not have been asserted by Melanchthon or Calvin; and barring Beza’s claim about the impossibility of non-spatial bodily presence, nothing that could not have been asserted by Ockham or Biel, or Aquinas or Scotus.

4.4 Andreae and the Colloquy of Maulbronn Andreae was Brenz’s follower, and his collaborator in the last decade of Brenz’s life. He and Beza were locked in repetitive and sometimes acrimonious dispute on

⁷⁸ ⁸¹ ⁸³ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁸

See Beza, Plac. resp., 44–5. See Beza, Plac. resp., 127. See Beza, Plac. resp., 28. See Beza, Plac. resp., 54. Beza, Plac. resp., 124. ⁸⁹

⁷⁹ See Beza, Plac. resp., 63. ⁸⁰ See Beza, Plac. resp., 45. ⁸² See Beza, Plac. resp., 25–6, 67. ⁸⁴ Beza, Plac. resp., 28. ⁸⁵ See Beza, Plac. resp., 345, 417. ⁸⁷ See Beza, Plac. resp., 70. Beza, Plac. resp., 150.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

158

 

these various Christological matters for many years, extending well into the 1580s. I examine the most significant of these exchanges in Chapter 7. But here I will look as Andreae’s direct response to Beza’s Placidum et modestum responsum—the Assertio piae et orthodoxae doctrinae de personali unione,⁹⁰ which Andreae wrote in 1565, the same year as Beza’s work was published—and at the list of theses from a disputation in February 1564.⁹¹ I conclude with a brief discussion of the Colloquy of Maulbronn (April 1564). The colloquy represented an important and in some ways influential, though spectacularly unsuccessful, attempt at formal rapprochement between Lutheran Christology (in one of its Württemberg variants) and Reformed. I treat it out of temporal sequence since in some respects it differs from what seems to have been Andreae’s settled view at this time, which he adopts both in the 1564 disputation and in the Assertio.

4.4.1 Andreae’s Early Christology Like Brenz before him, Andreae insists that his understanding of the hypostatic union is fully Chalcedonian. The two natures retain their essential and accidental properties,⁹² and they are united in one person.⁹³ Like Brenz, however, and for the same reason, Andreae rejects the supposital union: ‘All created things . . . are maintained ( foventur) and sustained (sustentantur) by him [viz. God] present in them.’⁹⁴ (Andreae maintains that the union is ‘quasi per accidens’;⁹⁵ I assume that he does not intend anything more than that the union is contingent.) Andreae agrees with Beza that the divine person made the human nature ‘his own’.⁹⁶ The human nature is assumed by the Word such that ‘one ὑφιστάμενον [i.e. subsistence] is constituted’.⁹⁷ But Andreae holds that this claim does not as such constitute any kind of theory of the hypostatic union (‘what is it for the nature to be made the Logos’s own?’),⁹⁸ and against Beza’s rejection of the genus maiestaticumB as both false and explanatorily vacuous, he maintains that the genus maiestaticumB does indeed do the work that the later Brenz assigns to it. ⁹⁰ Tübingen, 1565. Space precludes a discussion of Beza’s response to this treatise, the Tractatus tres de rebus gravissimis scripti (Geneva, 1565). ⁹¹ A disputation at which Andreae presided in June 1569 (Andreae, Disputatio de duabus naturis in Christo (Tübingen, 1569)) offers some very distinctive Christological insights, in particular about the state of humiliation. But the author apparently accepts the supposital union (Andreae, Disp. de duab., prop. 60 (fol. B3r)) and sometimes rejects the permissibility of non-trivial nature-predication tout court (Andreae, Disp. de duab., prop. 60 (fol. B3r); see too prop. 38 (fol. B1r)). Perhaps Andreae, despite presiding at the disputation, did not formulate the theses to be discussed by the respondent (in this case, one Francis Peleter, as we learn from the title page of the book). ⁹² Andreae, Assertio, 5. ⁹³ Andreae, Disputatio de maiestate hominis Christi (Tübingen, 1564), th. 4 (no pagination or foliation). ⁹⁴ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 16. ⁹⁵ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 9. ⁹⁶ Andreae, Assertio, 5, 6. ⁹⁷ Andreae, Assertio, 5. ⁹⁸ Andreae, Assertio, 7.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         Thus, he claims that the hypostatic union ‘can only be explicated through the Session at the right hand of God’,⁹⁹ construed as incarnation, not just exaltation; and, elsewhere, ‘The Logos makes the human nature his own, not that he should merely possess it, or communicate nothing to it, but he makes it his own in such a way as to confer on it all his majesty.’¹⁰⁰ At times, Andreae simply seems to reduce the hypostatic union to the genus maiestaticumB: ‘The humanity is a partaker (particeps) of the whole plenitude of the divine nature; the hypostatic union is to be defined by this κοινωνία ἰδιωμάτων [i.e. communion of properties] alone.’¹⁰¹ This last quotation looks like a simplification of Brenz’s view, since the hypostatic union is simply identified as the genus maiestaticumB, and there is here no mention of the communion of natures as such: the ‘plenitude of the divine nature’ simply consists in the divine attributes. But given the identity of the divine nature and attributes, I assume that he accepts the same UC-ordering as the later Brenz: ((genus maiestaticumB = sameness* of person) → hypostasis-as-subject). But Andreae does not understand the genus maiestaticumB in quite the way that Brenz does. We can see this most easily if we consider what Andreae says about Brenz’s aphoristic summary of the genus maiestaticumB, which Andreae quotes: ‘We do not make the humanity of Christ equal to the divinity in οὐσί[ᾳ] but only in ἐξουσί[ᾳ], not in essence but in power, not in nature but in glory, not in substance but in majesty.’¹⁰² Andreae does not understand this to mean that the human nature comes to possess a divine power. Rather, he interprets it merely in terms of divine activity in the nature—a difference in the way God acts in the assumed nature: It should not be imagined or thought that there is some presence of God, with respect to his οὐσίαν [i.e. essence], in Christ, other than in all other creatures. Just as he is discerned in creatures by ἐνεργέιᾳ [i.e. by activity]—that he does and brings about some things in others—so in Christ he is wholly poured out, so that there is now nothing outside him [i.e. Christ], and in and through the man Christ he brings about everything in everything.¹⁰³

The assumed nature becomes some sort of participant in all divine activity ad extra, and this is identified as ‘the communication of the whole plenitude of the deity’.¹⁰⁴ God ‘brings about some things in others’, without, I assume, this activity requiring the ‘others’ to have divine causal powers. The hypostatic union thus consists in the divine person’s bringing about the full range of divine activity ‘in

⁹⁹ Andreae, Assertio, 8. ¹⁰⁰ Andreae, Assertio, 14. ¹⁰¹ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 24. ¹⁰² Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 26, quoting a passage from Brenz that I discussed in section 4.2.2. On Andreae’s use of the passage, see Hendrik Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart: Die Christologie des Martin Chemnitz, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, 152 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 201–2. ¹⁰³ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 20. ¹⁰⁴ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 21.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

160

 

and through’ the human nature, without this requiring the human nature to have divine causal powers. Relative to Brenz’s view, Andreae’s has a kind of reverse direction: it is not that the human nature uses or exercises divine powers, but that the divine powers use the human nature, and are active in it.¹⁰⁵ Thus, Andreae claims that what it is to ‘make the flesh his own’—and thus what it is for the Word ‘to confer on it all his majesty’—is for the Word ‘to do everything in, with, and through the assumed nature’,¹⁰⁶ or (equivalently) ‘through the man’.¹⁰⁷ Andreae appeals to the soul–body analogy to give some idea of the kind of activity-relation he has in mind: ‘Just as the soul does everything through the body, and nothing without the body, so the Logos does everything through the assumed human nature, and does nothing without it.’¹⁰⁸ This provides us with one reason for thinking that the genus maiestaticum in general is relevant to unity. It consists fundamentally in the human nature’s having an instrumentally causal role in all divine activity. Andreae’s intuition that instrumentality is relevant to unity has a precedent here, though I do not know whether he knew of it. Many Medieval thinkers analysed instrumentality as a kind of unity, and some Medieval Thomists even grounded the hypostatic union simply in the relevant kind of instrumentality relation.¹⁰⁹ Of course, these thinkers do not accept any sort of genus maiestaticum. This is a marked difference from Brenz. The genus maiestaticum does not consist in the communication of a divine power, to be used by the human nature, but in the communication of divine activity, such that the divine power uses the human nature in its activity. Sometimes Andreae speaks in slightly more Brenzian mode: This is the teaching (doctrina) of our churches on the communication of the properties of the divine nature made to the human nature, by which the highest majesty and all properties of the divine nature are communicated to the man Christ, against that person who attributes to the man Christ magnificent titles,

¹⁰⁵ On this, see Hans Christian Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie und ihre von Jakob Andreae vertretene Form: Das Maulbronner Kolloquium 1564’, Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte, 100 (2000), 58–84. I summarize Andreae’s view in Tables 1 and 2. ¹⁰⁶ Andreae, Assertio, 21. ¹⁰⁷ Andreae, Assertio, 12; a claim that makes very clear Andreae’s Brenzian identification of the man and the human nature, and hence the distinction between the Son of God and the Son of Man. ¹⁰⁸ Andreae, Assertio, 14; see too Assertio, 21. ¹⁰⁹ For instance the Dominican Hervaeus Natalis (d. 1323): see his In quatuor libros sententiarum commentaria III, d 1, q. 1, a. 4 (Paris, 1647), p. 283b. Hervaeus’s immediate inspiration was Aquinas: see e.g. ST III, q. 18, a. 1 ad 4. For the development of the model in the later Thomist and Dominican tradition, see Marcel Nieden, Organum deitatis: Die Christologie des Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Thought, 62 (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1997), 160–75. The model is a refinement of the soul–body model, and in inchoate form can be found throughout the Patristic tradition: as Athanasius puts it, ‘Being God, he had his own body, and using this as an instrument, he became man for our sakes’ (Athanasius, Or. cont. Ar. III, c. 31 (PG, 26, 389A; NPNF, 410b).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         and very great appellations of dignity, but in the truth of the matter nothing further communicated other than the name and appellations.¹¹⁰

Andreae discusses this in terms of the finite human nature’s ‘being exalted to . . . the infinite power and wisdom . . . through which [nature] God does everything. . . . Without it [viz. the nature], the Logos does nothing; with it, everything’;¹¹¹ from which we can infer omnipresence, because the Word and the human nature do not act at a distance.¹¹² (And note Andreae’s express affirmation of the claim that omnipresence is not a created relation but ‘heavenly and divine’.)¹¹³ But even here there is no thought that the human nature possesses the divine power that Andreae is talking about. The activity is ascribed wholly to the divine person, and the human nature has nothing more than an instrumental role in it: what it is for the divine person to communicate its properties to the human nature is fundamentally for the divine person to bring about divine activities in and by means of the human nature. So the nature’s activity seems to be reducible to the activity of the divine person in that nature. I shall for convenience refer to this as Andreae’s ‘reductionist’ account of the genus maiestaticum. (‘Reductionist’ in the sense that the power-predications express activities, not powers; but the predications are nevertheless fundamental in the sense that the divine activities are fully real, and really exercised through the human nature in some unspecified sense.) While this goes some way towards solving the problem of how it might be that divine attributes and powers come to belong to the human nature, it does so at the cost of rendering it relatively mysterious precisely how it is that the divine person is active in the human nature, or brings about his activity by means of that nature, since it posits instrumentality apparently without any relevant power. And we might note in passing the slippage between ‘God’ and ‘the Logos’ in the passage quoted at the beginning of this section: the scope of divine activity that Andreae has in mind is wider than merely that proper to the Word in the Incarnation (it is ‘everything in everything’). And this makes Andreae peculiarly susceptible to Beza’s worry that this kind of view will amount to the Incarnation of all three divine persons, since the kind of activity that Andreae has in mind is common to all three. In virtue of this activity, the relevant energetic divine attributes can be predicated of the man and the human nature during Christ’s earthly life (for example, omnipresence (‘the whole Christ is said to be present’),¹¹⁴ omniscience (‘we say

¹¹⁰ Andreae, Assertio, 19. ¹¹¹ Andreae, Assertio, 12. On these grounds, Andreae can quickly dismiss as disanalogous Beza’s demonic example, which relates only to spatial presence, and not to the kind of causal relation that Andreae envisages: see Assertio, 30. ¹¹² See Andreae, Assertio, 26. ¹¹³ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 52. ¹¹⁴ Andreae, Assertio, 13; see also 15.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

162

 

that he [viz. Christ, including his soul] knew everything’),¹¹⁵ in virtue of their being (kryptically) exercised: ‘the assumed form of a servant . . . in whose possession [the bestowed majesty] already was, did not destroy (tolleret) the bestowed majesty, but hid it (tegeret) for a time’.¹¹⁶ (Nevertheless, the Reformed party at Maulbronn put considerable pressure on Andreae on the question of powerexercise during Christ’s earthly life, as we shall see.) Taking all this together, it seems that Andreae at this stage in his career accepts the following variant of BGM*-semantics: AGM₁-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the divine person p exercises Φd-ness through the human nature h’; and p exercises Φd-ness through h iff h is the same* person as p. One of the salient points of AGM₁-semantics, as for the corresponding principles in Brenz, is that incarnation here is sufficient for both for the metaphysical and the linguistic genus maiestaticumB. Unsurprisingly, then, like Brenz, Andreae argues from the hypostatic union directly to bodily omnipresence, and thence to Luther’s IBS principle: ‘Since the divinity assumed a man (in whom the whole deity dwelt bodily) into unity of person (the definition of which is the communication of the plenitude of God), it follows that the humanity of Christ is also present everywhere.’¹¹⁷ Andreae believes that the partaking relationship is an asymmetrical relationship (i.e. such that the divine nature (as opposed to the divine person) does not participate in the attributes of the human nature) on the grounds, as we have seen, that according to Andreae the divine nature assumes the human nature—and not vice versa.¹¹⁸ Andreae’s discussion of omnipresence reveals very clearly his explicit adherence to BMP. He holds that the omnipresence of the whole Christ requires the omnipresence of the man Christ, and that this latter omnipresence in turn requires the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature. Against Beza’s claim that the omnipresence of the man Christ is sufficiently secured by the omnipresence of the divinity, Andreae argues, ‘It is not asked whether the Logos is present; about this, no one doubts. But rather this is asked—since the whole Christ is not the Logos alone—whether the Logos alone is present, or also the man Christ, namely, the whole according to each nature?’¹¹⁹ And the implied answer, of course, is that the whole Christ is (i.e. ‘according to each nature’); and to be omnipresent ‘according to’ the human nature is for the humanity to be omnipresent.

¹¹⁵ Andreae, Assertio, 22. ¹¹⁶ Andreae, Assertio, 9. ¹¹⁷ Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 34. ¹¹⁸ See Andreae, Disp. de maiest., th. 19. ¹¹⁹ Andreae, Assertio, 16.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

        

4.4.2 The Colloquy of Maulbronn In April 1564, between the two works I have been discussing thus far, the Württemberg theologians and their immediate neighbours, the Reformed theologians of the Palatinate, met at Maulbronn to discuss matters Christological and the Eucharistic.¹²⁰ Zacharias Ursinus (1534–83), Caspar Olevian (1536–87) and Pierre Boquin (?–1582) were the main spokespersons for the Palatinate theologians. There were no official proceedings of the colloquy, though a number of quite detailed summaries of the debates were printed. Here I rely on the earliest report, published by the Württemberg theologians in 1564.¹²¹ The colloquy assumed that Brenz’s Christology, or (as it turned out) a close variant of it, straightforwardly represented the Lutheran position. For example, Andreae argues in the colloquy that, unless Christ’s humanity is omnipotent, it will be false that Christ the man is omnipotent—a standard case of Brenzian communicatio.¹²² Likewise, he claims, if we accept CN-semantics for ‘Christ the man [is omnipotent]’, and deny the genus maiestaticumB, it will follow that the man Christ is omnipotent ‘in name only’¹²³—a typically Brenzian association of CN-semantics with the denial of the genus maiestaticumB. On this view, then, CNsemantics in the absence of the genus maiestaticumB gets the wrong truth-values for certain Christological predications. Andreae repeats the trope of later Brenzian Christology that in the absence of the genus maiestaticumB there is no way of distinguishing the Word’s presence in Jesus from his presence in Peter:¹²⁴ without the majesty Christ’s human nature, ‘it follows . . . that God did not become flesh’.¹²⁵ Boquin claimed, against this, that what is at stake is not the genus maiestaticum but the hypostatic union.¹²⁶ In response, Andreae, again building on Brenz’s late view, argued that the Scriptures speak not of the hypostatic union but only of varieties of divine presence, thereby identifying the unique Christological mode of presence as the majesty of the human nature.¹²⁷ Andreae attempted to deal with the problem of Christ’s earthly life by arguing that Christ’s human nature had the majestic attributes during this time, but ‘in first act, but not in second act, as the Schools say’: like someone asleep who does not actually ‘think or act’—but has the immediate power to.¹²⁸ The Aristotelian ¹²⁰ On this, see Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie’. For a lively account in English of relevant parts of the colloquy, see Charles D. Gunnoe, Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation, Brill’s Series in Church History, 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 139–46. ¹²¹ Warhafftiger unnd grundtlicher Bericht von dem Gesprech zwischen des Churfürsten Pfalzgrauen und des Hertzogen zůWürrtemberg Theologen von des Herren Nachtmal zů Maulbronn gehalten (n. pl., 1564). For the remaining reports, see Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie’. ¹²² Grundtlicher Bericht, 37–9. ¹²³ Grundtlicher Bericht, 25. ¹²⁴ Grundtlicher Bericht, 13–14, 18–19. ¹²⁵ Grundtlicher Bericht, 20. ¹²⁶ Grundtlicher Bericht, 13. ¹²⁷ Grundtlicher Bericht, 15–17. ¹²⁸ Grundtlicher Bericht, 32. See Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie’, 72–3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

164

 

distinction Andreae is talking about is between possessing a power, on the one hand, and an activity brought about in virtue of that power, on the other—powerpossession and power-exercise, respectively.¹²⁹ The idea is that the power can be possessed without exercise. But Andreae does not abandon his view that predication tracks activity. So he comes to accept the following principle: AGM₂-semantics: ‘the Son of Man is φd’ =def ‘the divine person p exercises Φd-ness through the human nature h’; and p exercises Φd-ness through h only if (h bears Φd-ness, and h is the same* person as p). The purpose of accepting this principle is that Andreae wants to find a way of defending the view that, during Christ’s earthly life the human nature possessed the relevant attributes (‘h bears Φd-ness’) even though it was not characterized by them—an attempt to have his cake and eat it, affirming the metaphysical genus maiestaticumB in the absence of the linguistic one. Thus the Incarnation is on this view necessary but not sufficient for the linguistic genus maiestaticumB—in contrast to AGM₁-semantics. Comparing AGM₁-semantics and AGM₂-semantics makes the change obvious: the weakening of the relevant bi-conditional in AGM₁semantics (and the two Brenzian semantics) to a mere necessary condition. What Andreae has to affirm explicitly, relative to his earlier position, is that the human nature has divine causal powers. This enables him to maintain that we can predicate powers of Christ during his earthly life, even if not the divine attribute itself: for example, ‘to be able to see everything in the world’.¹³⁰ This is not the same as being omniscient, which is consequently (I assume) not predicated of the Son of Man during Christ’s earthly life. (I do not know how Andreae here would deal with omnipotence: the issue did not arise in the discussion.) Whereas for the late Brenz power-possession and power-exercise are co-extensive, for Andreae at Maulbronn they are not. Andreae persistently holds in all of these works from the 1560s that predication tracks power-exercise, not power-possession. Hence the possession of the power is part of set of necessary but not sufficient conditions for the truth of ‘the Son of Man is φ’, as in AGM₂-semantics. Given merely Andreae’s supposition that the metaphysical genus maiestaticumB is a necessary condition for the Incarnation, we cannot tell which of the two UC-orderings, his own and the later Brenz’s, on the one hand, and the earlier Brenz’s, on the other, he would accept at Maulbronn. There is, at least, no evidence that he has changed his mind on the matter, so we might reasonably infer that the account is the same as in the other discussions considered in this section, though with the note that the metaphysical genus maiestaticumB is distinguished from the linguistic (in terms of power-possession vs. power-exercise). Overall, this bundle of views represents a ¹²⁹ See Aristotle, De an. II, c. 1 (412a10–11). Andreae’s discussion quite closely echoes Aristotle, De an. II, c. 1 (412a21–7). ¹³⁰ Grundtlicher Bericht, 32.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

         radical shift from Andreae’s standard opinion during the decade—and, given the predication rules, a radical shift from Brenz’s view too. The revised theory obviously allows Andreae to deal with the problem of the distinction between humiliation and exaltation, by accepting—in contrast to his general treatment of the issues—a straightforwardly kenotic account. Christ began to use the majesty—and thus be subject to majestic predicates—at the Exaltation (and periodically during his life: for example when, aged twelve, discussing theology with the teachers in Jerusalem (see Lk 2:46–7)).¹³¹ But given AGM₂semantics, the revised theory comes at grave cost: one of the necessary conditions for the truth of ‘the Son of Man is φd’ fails to be satisfied during Christ’s earthly life—namely, that the divine person exercises Φd-ness through the human nature. So during Christ’s earthly life, for example, not only will it be false that the Son of Man is eternal; it will be false that the Son of Man is omnipotent—the very criticism that Andreae had levelled at those theologians accepting CN-semantics. The same goes for omnipresence, and the Reformed group exploited this problem during the discussions at Maulbronn. (I do not know whether they noticed that what they said about omnipresence would go for other divine attributes as well: obviously, omnipresence was the issue that all sides found so provoking.) In effect, the Reformed theologians forced Andreae to deny factual bodily omnipresence: under pressure, he claimed (to Brenz’s evident annoyance) that the lack of bodily omnipresence is compatible with hypostatic union.¹³² This by itself again (assuming AGM₂-semantics) yields a result contrary to Chalcedon, according to which the Son of Man (i.e. the divine person) is omnipresent throughout his existence. And if the hypostatic union consists inter alia in bodily omnipresence, then, given Andreae’s modification, a central part of the whole Brenzian edifice will come tumbling down, irrespective of any more general commitment to AGM₂-semantics.¹³³ As we shall see in Chapter 6, Andreae appears to make a similar damaging concession in the Formula of Concord too, though for very different reasons.

¹³¹ For the Exaltation, see Grundtlicher Bericht, 33–4; for the episode in Lk 2, see Grundtlicher Bericht, 32. For a summary, see Tables 1 and 2. ¹³² Grundtlicher Bericht, 32–3. For Brenz’s reaction, see Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie’, 73. ¹³³ See Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie’, 74.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

5 The Genus Maiestaticum in Non-Brenzian Christologies In this chapter I consider some thinkers who develop the tradition of Westphal and Hesshus, accepting the genus maiestaticum in some sense, but rejecting its grounding in Brenzian communicatio: the Aristotelian philosopher Jacob Schegk (1511–87), and the theologians Johann Wigand (c. 1523–87) and Martin Chemnitz (in the first (1570) edition of his De duabus naturis in Christo; the second edition (1578) modifies some of Chemnitz’s positions in the light of the 1577 Formula of Concord, and I deal with this later text at the end of the next chapter, once I have given an account of the formula itself ).

5.1 Schegk Schegk’s principal Christological discussion can be found in his 1565 treatise De una persona et duabus naturis Christi.¹ Although Schegk spent his whole academic career at Tübingen, his Christology is quite independent of that of the Brenzians. He accepts the supposital-union theory, for example, and Scotus’s negation-theory of subsistence,² and uses the supposital union as the basis for an acceptance of the genus idiomaticum.³ He refuses to use the term ‘man’ to refer to the assumed nature, and thus does not follow Brenz’s asymmetrical understanding of the communicatio. But he accepts Luther’s IBS principle⁴ and the genus maiestaticum in relation to at least omnipotence as well as omnipresence, and attempts to give some kind of account of one of the issues left unclear in earlier accounts—namely, the relation between the divine attributes and the human nature in the genus maiestaticum: ¹ Frankfurt-am-Main, 1565. Schegk wrote other Christological treatises too, but a complete treatment would take me too far away from my attempt to trace through the main contours of the development of Lutheran Christology. On Schegk’s Christology, see Klinge, ‘Jacob Schegks “De una persona” (1565) und der Mythos der frühen lutherischen Christologie’, in Peter Opitz (ed.), The Myth of the Reformation, Refo500, 9 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 233–47; also Brandy, ‘Brenz’ Christologie’, 77–80; Gunnoe, Thomas Erastus, 155–8. ² Schegk, De una pers., p. 17. He more or less quotes parts of Scotus’s account of hypostatic dependence as a relation of order at De una pers., pp. 22–3; as a relation of disquiparantiae (i.e. nonmutuality) at p. 24 (see Scotus, Ord. III, d. 1, p.1, q. 1, n. 14 (IX, 6)); and as analogous to an accident of the Word at p. 25. ³ See Schegk, De una pers., p. 20. ⁴ Schegk, De una pers., p. 2.

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

167

On account of the personal union, all the actions and passions, or all the ἔργα καὶ πάθη—such as being born, suffering, rising from the dead, ascending, sitting at the right hand of the Father, being omnipotent, being everywhere and omnipresent—are ascribed to the person of Christ on account of the natures, that is, by which each of those ἐργῶν καὶ πάθῶν [i.e. actions and passions] is per se in one of the natures, and per accidens in the other—not per accidens in the way that μονογενῆ [i.e. unique things] participate each other mutually (as when I say, ‘fire is hot per se, water hot per accidens’), but in virtue of the fact that one nature is said to participate personally in the other, which manner of accident (as we say) Aristotle explained by the phrase ‘τῷ ἔχειν’ [i.e. ‘by (reason of) having’]: as when we say that the separate mind (mentem) understands by itself, while the composite human being [understands] τῷ ἔχειν, that is, by reason (ratione) of a certain having (habitus); or [as when] we say that the mind (mentem) in a human being understands because it understands in itself, whereas the soul (anima) [understands] because it participates in the mind (since it has the mind). And in this way we say that the divinity of Christ is naturally or through its essence omnipresent, whereas the humanity is personally [omnipresent], but not [omnipresent] in οὐσίᾳ [i.e. in essence], but [in] ἕξει [i.e. in having/habitu], or ἐξουσίᾳ [i.e. in power], that is, ἔχουσα οὐσίαν [i.e. having the essence], the omnipotent [essence], of the divinity.⁵

There is a great deal going on in this dense passage—including at least one Greek pun (or perhaps faux etymology). In the second paragraph, Schegk claims that the divine essence is necessarily omnipresent, whereas the humanity is omnipresent in virtue of ‘having’ the omnipotent divine essence: it is omnipresent not in essence but in power, as in Brenz’s formulation, which is clearly an inspiration here. This is an instance of what it is to participate personally in the divinity, as the first part of the first paragraph explains. In the rest of the first paragraph Schegk gives two examples of the way in which an attribute might be ‘had’ in the relevant way, and a contrasting case. The contrasting case is a property or accident inherent in a substance: hot fire and hot water are both hot—fire necessarily so (by a necessary accident or proprium, in Porphyrian theory), and water contingently so (by a contingently inherent accident, in Porphyrian theory). They both bear the property heat as an inherent quality. (The precise significance of ‘μονογενῆ’ in this argument has thus far eluded me.) The pertinent cases are not like this, in at least two ways. First, in these cases, the predication relations are nested: thus, according to Schegk, Aristotle holds that the mind—nous, I assume—understands, and that in virtue of their participating in the mind we can truly affirm both that the soul understands and that the human ⁵ Schegk, De una pers., praef. (fols. B2v–B3r).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

168

 

being understands. So in virtue of the mind’s cognitive acts, we can predicate the relevant acts of the human being.⁶ Secondly, as Schegk intereprets him, Aristotle sometimes uses ‘to have (ἔχειν)’ in a technical sense to talk about the relation between a human being and their knowledge—and thus to talk about a case in which predication does not presuppose inherence. For example, Aristotle claims that ‘we are called knowledgeable (ἐπιστήμονες) by the possession (τῷ ἔχειν) of knowledge (ἐπιστημῶν) in a particular [branch of knowledge]’.⁷ I take the point to be that knowledge is not like an inherent accident: it is predicated of us—we ‘have’ it, in Schegk’s language—without its being the kind of thing that, like heat, could inhere. As Aristotle notes, the change that occurs when we acquire and use knowledge is ‘another kind of change’ from the usual sort—to wit, it does not involve gaining and losing inherent accidental forms.⁸ There are two ways of understanding this contrast, and which one we opt for makes a difference to the Christological case. I have just described the contrasts as minimally as possible, as involving in the two cases merely nested predication (as opposed to any ontological relation), and predication without inherence, respectively. But the nested predication could be grounded in the ontological piggybacking of properties, and the predication without inherence could be grounded in ontological bearing (having/possessing) without inherence. Understood in this more expansive way, we would say in the first case that, in virtue of the mind’s bearing its cognitive acts, the human being bears the relevant cognitive acts (and in virtue of this latter relation the cognitive acts are predicated of the human being); and in the second case, knowledge is borne by the human being without inhering (and this bearing relation grounds the predication relation). Christologically, the two interpretations would apply as follows. Take the ontologically minimal case. The analogies would allow divine attributes to be predicated of the human nature in virtue of its bearing the divine nature in some way—perhaps simply in virtue of its being hypostatically united to the divine nature—and (presumably) divine properties can be had by the divine nature without inhering. In the more expansive reading, the human nature bears divine properties in virtue of bearing the divine nature (which in turn has the relevant properties). On the face of it, it seems marginally more plausible to read the text in the minimalist way. But elsewhere Schegk says something that ⁶ Schegk’s reading of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind seems questionable but not impossible. At one point Aristotle does indeed seem to ascribe thinking to the mind as such: ‘in the case of the mind (nous), thought about an object that is highly intelligible renders it [viz. the mind] more and not less able afterwards to think about objects that are less intelligible’ (Aristotle, De an. III, c. 4 (429b2–3)); and at least once he seems to ascribe thinking, derivatively, to the soul: ‘concerning the part of the soul [viz. the mind] by which the soul both knows and understands . . . ’ (Aristotle, De an. III, c. 4 (429a10–11)). (I am grateful to Christopher Shields for these references.) ⁷ Aristotle, Cat., c. 8 (11a33–4). ⁸ See Aristotle, De an. II, c. 5 (417b5–10). That mental states and acts have some kind of intentional rather than real existence was a common though not uncontroverted position among the Scholastics, and was taken by many of them to be an Aristotelian doctrine.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

169

pushes in the more expansive direction: ‘the communication of [divine] properties is attributed to the human nature in Christ not merely by a verbal predication, but by a true and real personal [predication]’⁹—by which he very likely means that the properties are borne by the human nature (without inhering), and that the predication is thus realf. As we shall see, Schegk’s view is influential on Chemnitz, and Chemnitz clearly presupposes the more expansive interpretation of Schegk’s claims. (Conceivably, ‘personal predication’ could just be a way of talking about the genus idiomaticum, predicating the various properties of the man Christ. But then the contrast between ‘real’ and ‘merely . . . verbal’ would seem to be lost.) On either reading, the minimal one and the more expansive one, it would be easy to miss the significance of Schegk’s contribution to the overall discussion. As we have seen, adherents of the genus maiestaticum need at the very least an account of the way in which divine properties can be predicated without inhering. And some of them need an account of the way in which divine properties can be borne without being predicated. Schegk provides cases in which these various relations (inherence, being borne, being predicated) can come apart. For Schegk himself, as the quoted passage makes clear, the relevant attributes can be predicated. But on either interpretation they are so without inhering.¹⁰ Admittedly, the examples do not map the relation between the human nature and the divine very closely. The first is broadly mereological—the human being has the mind as a part (I assume; in virtue of having the soul as a part), and this is what it is for the human being to participate in the mind. And this does little to illuminate the Christological case as Schegk understands it. The second is a bit closer, if we adopt something like Brenz’s account of the way in which the human nature participates in divine attributes: the soul has the mind as a disposition, and this is what it is for the soul to participate in the mind; similarly, the human nature has divine attributes as powers of its, and this is what it is for the human nature to participate in the divine nature. Schegk also makes a distinction between the ‘personal’ perfection and the ‘accidental’ perfection of the human nature, and uses this to tie up a further loose end in Brenz’s account—namely, how it is that believers are made like Christ by some kind of limited participation in divine attributes. According to Schegk, they have degrees of the accidental perfections had by Christ’s humanity, but not the personal perfections. And I assume that the accidental perfections are just

⁹ Schegk, De una pers., p. 3. ¹⁰ Schegk—as the quoted passage makes quite clear—is explicit that the human nature is (e.g.) omnipresent, and what secures the truth of this predication is some relation to the divine essence. So the following appraisal of Schegk’s position is not quite right, since Schegk affirms the opposite of its first clause: ‘The human nature in Christ is not omnipresent, but rather “has” or “holds” only the omnipresence of the divine nature’ (Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart, 201). For Schegk, the human nature is characterized by omnipresence (and probably has it too), contrary to Klinge’s assertion of the metaphysical genus maiestaticum without a correlative linguistic one.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

170

 

created habits and dispositions, as for the Schoolmen.¹¹ (Again, the ‘personal’ perfection could be perfection of the man Christ, not of the humanity; but in that case Schegk’s claims would fundamentally eliminate the genus maiestaticum— while giving the impression that he accepted it. But for reasons given, I do not think we should interpret him this way.) As we shall see, Chemnitz later on makes a similar distinction between participation through created graces and virtues, and participation through direct possession of the divine attributes—and ascribes the first to both Christ and the believer, but the second to Christ alone.

5.2 Wigand Wigand’s treatise De communicatione idiomatum dates from 1569. Like Hesshus and, later, Chemnitz, and in sharp contrast to Brenz and his followers, Wigand does not believe that there is an argument directly from the hypostatic union to the genus maiestaticum. Rather he holds that the genus maiestaticum is to be argued for simply on Scriptural grounds.¹² And, again like Heshuss and Chemnitz (and Schegk, too), he accepts the genus maiestaticum while rejecting Brenzian communicatio. His position is of intrinsic interest; but it is important too because of its influence, positive and negative, on Chemnitz’s thinking in the following few years.

5.2.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Idiomaticum Wigand says very little on the nature of the hypostatic union itself. At one point he offers a brief definition: Let us present a certain definition of the personal union. The personal union in Christ is that by which the nature of the Son of God is united to the human nature in Mary’s womb, so that these two natures are one ὑφιστάμενον [i.e. subsistence], one person, and in this union the divine nature communicates properties to the human nature, above and beyond the natural properties which otherwise no human nature outside Christ has, nevertheless preserving each nature, for the salvation and dignity of the human race. The bases for this definition are, ‘The Word was made flesh’, ‘All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me’, and similar clear sayings.¹³

¹¹ For the whole discussion see Schegk, De una pers., praef. (fol. B3r). ¹² Wigand makes the point frequently: see e.g. De communicatione idiomatum (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1569), 32, 101, 132, 148–9. ¹³ Wigand, De comm., 59, quoting Jn 1:14 and Mt 28:18.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

171

Note that this definition already makes the metaphysical genus maiestaticum a necessary feature of the Incarnation—albeit that we know this not a priori but simply on Scriptural grounds. Elsewhere, Wigand makes it clear that the one person is identical with the second person of the Trinity.¹⁴ On the nature of the union itself, Wigand mentions the soul–body analogy.¹⁵ He grounds the union in what he calls a ‘real communion of the divine person’, such that ‘the human nature or body and soul of Christ is not its own (peculiaris) person, because . . . it never existed outside the hypostatic union of Christ’.¹⁶ And he sees this union as a relation between the divine person and the human nature: ‘Colossians 2: “in him [viz. the man; the human nature] dwelt all the fullness σωματικῶς [i.e. corporeally]”, that is personally and really, not merely causally (effective). For the Greeks use “τὸ σῶμα” [i.e. “the body”] for person and substance.’¹⁷ This perhaps looks like a reference to the supposital union: the relevant relation is not causal, and it confers subsistence on the human nature. But the reference is admittedly allusive. Wigand’s most notable commitment is a sharp distinction between the semantics of the genus idiomaticum and the semantics of the genus maiestaticum. In relation to the first of these, Wigand argues that predication in the genus idiomaticum is merely verbal: it is ‘secundum phrasin (verbal)’, not ‘realis (real)’, by which he means not that such predications are false, but that they are non-fundamental—so the rejected sense in which they fail to be real is realf. The principle underlying this is mereological, but relevant not to truth but merely to fundamentality: since predication in the genus idiomaticum is not true of both natures, the predication cannot be fundamental (it cannot be realf and cannot express a real property borne by the (whole) subject). The relevant properties are borne by just one of the natures, not both: The communicatio idiomatum according to language (phraseos) is the predication by which a property that pertains (conveniens) to one nature is attributed (tribuitur) to the other, in the person or in concreto, from a certain manner of speaking, on account of the hypostatic union of natures. For example, ‘the Son of Man is the creator of heaven and earth’, that is, the person about whom this locution is, is the creator of the world, because he is God and man, even though the human nature in this person is posterior to the creation of the world, and is not itself the creator of the world but is a creature if considered in abstracto.¹⁸

The idea is that it is true of the person, the Son of Man, that he is the creator of heaven and earth. And this is so even though it is false that the human nature created the world. (I return to the concrete/abstract distinction in a moment.) Of course, there is no objection to a (merely verbal) predication’s being true, since Wigand evidently does not believe that truth requires fundamentality. ¹⁴ Wigand, De comm., 48. ¹⁷ Wigand, De comm., 89.

¹⁵ Wigand, De comm., 51–2. ¹⁸ Wigand, De comm., 29.

¹⁶ Wigand, De comm., 89.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

172

 

Similar considerations cover predications ‘in natural matter’ too. Thus, Wigand holds that ‘Jesus Christ is true God’ is true ‘iuxta phrasin’—verbally—on the grounds that the human nature is not itself God (and thus not every part of the whole referred to by ‘Jesus Christ’ is God): To be God by reason of the [divine] essence, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is communicated to the person of Christ verbally (secundum phrasin). For the human nature in Christ is not God by origin, and does not essentially cross over into the divinity, because the essential properties on both sides remain unconfused, inviolable, and perpetual. But because the Scripture speaks of the person, therefore this predication, ‘Jesus Christ is true God’ is attributed to the person of Christ verbally (iuxta phrasin).¹⁹

Wigand does not of course mean that it is false that Jesus Christ is God; on the contrary, the predication is endorsed in the Scriptures. The deity is communicated merely verbally to the human nature—the relevant predication ‘in natural matter’ is true, but it is not true of the whole. Wigand’s use of the concrete/abstract distinction tracks his loosely mereological understanding of the relevant predications. Concrete terms refer to the ‘person in whom two united natures exist’—which Wigand understands as a way of picking out the whole complex, (person + two natures). Thus, he holds that in cases of concrete accident terms (such as ‘white’), what is signified ‘is both the whiteness (albedinem) and the substance in which the brightness (candor) inheres’.²⁰ Abstract terms, contrariwise, in standard contexts signify merely the natures,²¹ which ‘we consider in abstracto only in thought (speculationem)’,²² or in ‘the thought of the mind (cogitatio mentis)’.²³ And Wigand makes a distinction between those linguistically abstract nouns that signify natures independently of the person and those linguistically concrete nouns that signify natures in the sense of signifying the person + one of his natures: for example, between ‘humanity (humanitas)’ and ‘man (homo)’. In Wigand’s technical sense of ‘abstract’, these are all abstract nouns.²⁴ The latter—a linguistically concrete noun—can, unlike the former, refer to the whole via synecdoche.²⁵ Paradigm cases of concrete nouns (in the technical sense—those that signify the whole) are ‘Christ’, ‘Jesus’—nouns that refer to the whole complex, (person + two natures) in the way just outlined.²⁶ Wigand also expressly holds that the correct semantics for the genus idiomaticum is CN-semantics. He asserts this on various occasions: To be born substantially and from eternity from the heavenly Father alone is not attributed really to the human nature of Christ, because it is a property of the ¹⁹ Wigand, De comm., 126. ²² Wigand, De comm., 102. ²⁵ Wigand, De comm., 154–5.

²⁰ Wigand, De comm., 26. ²³ Wigand, De comm., 25. ²⁶ Wigand, De comm., 153.

²¹ Wigand, De comm., 25. ²⁴ Wigand, De comm., 153.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

173

divine nature or essence. But it is attributed to the person verbally (iuxta phrasin) because this person, who truly has this nature, is predicated [thus] in Scripture.²⁷

Here the predication is true not because the person bears the relevant property, but because he has (I assume, ‘bears’) a nature that in turn has the relevant property—a precise statement of the truth conditions for Christological predications on the assumption that CN-semantics is the correct semantics for such predications. Commenting on I Jn 1:7 (‘May the blood of Christ, his Son, cleanse us from all sin’), Wigand notes, ‘Here he speaks of the person who had a human nature that could be killed’.²⁸ And more generally, though prima facie slightly puzzlingly, The kinds of things that properly pertain to a nature or essence are not communicated really, but are assigned (assignantur) to the person verbally (iuxta phrasin), on account of the union of the two natures in the one person. The devout therefore accurately observe that although these things [viz. being liable to laceration and death] are, with respect to the natures, not attributed to each other mutually, nevertheless they are truly and really attributed (attribuuntur) with respect to the person (respectu personae), because the person has such a nature to which these things really belong (competant).²⁹

The apparent puzzle here is the claim that the predicates belong to the person both really and (merely) verbally. It could be that Wigand wants to posit a distinction between being ‘communicated’ to a person—i.e. borne by the person—and ‘assigned’ or ‘attributed with respect to a person’: the latter perhaps signals that the relevant predications are true even though the properties are not borne by the person. At any rate, the point about verbal predication has to do not with Wigand’s acceptance of CN-semantics for the genus idiomaticum but with the requirement that real predication needs both natures to bear the relevant property. Here predication is verbal because the predicate is not attributed to the whole; but it is real in the sense of being true. So the puzzle is simply an equivocation in the term ‘real’—between realf and realt. ‘Verbally’ is a mark of the predication’s not being realf, and ‘truly’ is a mark of its being realt. Some of these statements of CN-semantics are the most explicit I have found, in propria persona, in any of the texts I have read in the period, from either side of the Lutheran–Reformed divide. It is perhaps no surprise, at least from a conceptual point of view, to find the following at the very beginning of Wigand’s discussion, endorsing Zwingli’s term alloiosis: ‘This communicatio idiomatum is named by Damascene the τρόπος τῆς ἀντιδόσεως [i.e. the manner of the exchange], that is, mutual (alterna) attribution; or οἰκείωσις, [that is], appropriation; or (clearly for

²⁷ Wigand, De comm., 124.

²⁸ Wigand, De comm., 129.

²⁹ Wigand, De comm., 130.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

174

 

the same reason) ἀλλοίωσις, [that is], alteration, change.’³⁰ Wigand’s view on the semantics of the genus idiomaticum is indeed close to Zwingli’s, and that of the Reformed theologians in general.

5.2.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum In line with what I have just said, mereological considerations underlie Wigand’s account of the semantics of the genus maiestaticum too. Since in this genus divine properties are had both by the divine nature and by the human nature, the predication has the whole Christ, both natures, as its subject. In relation to various predications in the genus maiestaticum (in which the properties belong jointly to both natures), Wigand notes, In the real communicationes of the idiomata, which are attributed to the person, they [viz. the idiomata] pertain to each nature really, and this on account of the communication made to the human nature. . . . In these sayings there is a real communicatio of the idiomata pertaining to each nature. For these sayings are said clearly of the person himself.³¹

That is to say, the divine properties belong jointly to (are metaphysically had by) both natures (in virtue of having been really communicated to the human nature), and in virtue of this can be predicated of the divine person. And because the divine properties are had by both natures, the predication is, in Wigand’s terminology, not verbal but real—realf, both true and fundamental. Wigand is clear that, as a matter of fact, the relevant properties are (in some sense) borne by Christ’s human nature only as it is united to the divine person. As Wigand puts it, the properties are not had ‘in abstracto’, separate from the person.³² And they are the ipsissimae divine properties, here identified explicitly as powers: There is not a two-fold but a wholly single power in Christ. For the very power that the Son of God had by origin in his divine nature, from eternity, this one I say was communicated to the humanity which he assumed, that is, into his person. For the Son of God never gave up what he had, even though he humiliated himself more profoundly than any creatures could perceive in their minds. The humanity is therefore hypostatically united to the divinity in Christ, and received in time, by gift, every sort of power. But this power is not created, or distinct from that which the divine nature of Christ possessed from eternity.³³

³⁰ Wigand, De comm., 25. ³¹ Wigand, De comm., 139. ³² See Wigand, De comm., 100, 102, 138. ³³ Wigand, De comm., 106; see too 50.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

175

This communication is real, and as the first text quoted in this section shows, is a consequence of the Incarnation as such. Wigand typically treats the correlative predication relations as having ‘Christ’ as their subject. On occasion he predicates the relevant properties of the human nature too: ‘The human nature sits at the right hand of God’, for example.³⁴ But note, as I shall argue in a moment, that Wigand restricts the linguistic genus maiestaticum to the Exaltation. Wigand argues that we can sort the divine attributes into two categories, communicated and uncommunicated, and thereby formalizes or at least labels a distinction that we have already encountered in Brenz: ‘Some properties in Christ are communicable, some are not. The communicable ones are those that relate to the person, majesty, and actions. The incommunicable ones are those which relate to the natures or essences.’³⁵ In the sense that the so-called ‘majestic’ properties are themselves properties of God, Wigand is prepared to allow a distinction between two kinds of essential property in God: If someone, clarifying everything very precisely and showing particular subtlety, wanted to claim that the majesty itself pertains to the essence, I would want them also to acknowledge that majesty is a communicable property. And for this reason we could distinguish between some communicable essential properties and some incommunicable ones. But we, following the ease of teaching, will repeat in this particular place that majesty is a communicable property (as can be shown in the sacred writings).³⁶

It is possible to distinguish essential properties into communicable (majestic) ones and incommunicable ones. But according to Wigand it is easier to identify essential properties simply as the incommunicable ones, and thus to divide the terrain up as follows: incommunicable essence (contra Brenz) and essential attributes; communicable person, majestic attributes, and actions. Which attributes fall into which groups? Wigand offers a precise taxonomy, taking the incommunicable properties to be essential properties and the communicable properties to pertain to the person, or to be majestic properties or divine activities.³⁷ And having drawn the distinction, he discusses which divine features can be metaphysically communicated to the human nature. He specifies as communicable the person, majesty, and actions.³⁸ The ‘personal communication’ is union of the human nature to the divine person, grounding the hypostatic union.³⁹ (I speculated above that this might be understood along the lines of the supposital union.) The communication of the majesty consists in the communication to the human nature of ‘excellence, power, and honour’:⁴⁰ respectively, great-making properties (eminence over creatures,⁴¹

³⁴ Wigand, De comm., 113. ³⁷ Wigand, De comm., 76–82. ⁴⁰ Wigand, De comm., 91.

³⁵ Wigand, De comm., 130. ³⁸ See Wigand, De comm., 87. ⁴¹ See Wigand, De comm., 91–4.

³⁶ Wigand, De comm., 80–1. ³⁹ Wigand, De comm., 88.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

176

 

wisdom,⁴² omniscience,⁴³ justice,⁴⁴ and being life-giving);⁴⁵ omnipotence⁴⁶ and omnipresence;⁴⁷ and being adorable⁴⁸ and the mediator.⁴⁹ Under actions Wigand lists a series of theandric actions.⁵⁰ The discussion of miracles reveals just how Wigand is thinking of the exercise of divine power by the human nature: The divine nature, which has by origin (originaliter) the power . . . to perform (edere) miracles, communicates it to his humanity in the person, so that the divine nature of Christ does not do miracles separately, but the human nature [does them] at the same time, in the person, on account of this real communication of properties.⁵¹

So here, theandric actions are treated as an instance of the genus maiestaticum, and Wigand holds that there is a sense in which the human nature that exercises the relevant power; he does not talk of the activity as something brought about in the human nature by the divine. So on this question he follows Brenz’s account, and distances himself from Andreae’s reductionist account of the genus maiestaticum. I tentatively suggested above that the communion of the person should be understood as the supposital union. If this is so, the supposital union in turn explains the hypostatic union—the communion of the natures—and the genus idiomaticum. And the hypostatic union itself in turn in some sense explains or requires the genus maiestaticum, as we saw in the definition of the hypostatic union quoted at the very beginning of this section. So this yields a three-stage explanatory UC-ordering: (supposital union → (hypostatic union + hypostasis-assubject) → genus maiestaticum). We shall see something similar in Chemnitz. Wigand clearly holds that the communication of majesty and activity involves the human nature coming to possess the relevant features in a certain way. But Wigand does not explain what this possession amounts to. He holds that Christ’s humiliation simply involves the temporary hiding of the relevant features (of both natures), by not exercising the divine powers—a kryptic account, not a kenotic one, as Wigand sees it.⁵² But although, as Wigand makes clear, Christ’s human nature had the divine majesty, it is not immediately clear whether or not he thinks that power-possession (as opposed to power-exercise) is sufficient for predication. He notes that ‘some things are said of the humiliated Christ, and other things of the glorified Christ, or the Christ who is to be glorified’.⁵³ And the context seems to suggest that the difference in predicates relates to divine ones, not simply human ones (such as being ‘obedient unto death, even death on a cross’).⁵⁴ In

⁴² ⁴⁴ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁸ ⁵⁰ ⁵² ⁵⁴

See Wigand, De comm., 94. ⁴³ See Wigand, De comm., 94–5. See Wigand, De comm., 95–7. ⁴⁵ See Wigand, De comm., 97–8. See Wigand, De comm., 98–107. ⁴⁷ See Wigand, De comm., 107–12. See Wigand, De comm., 112–15. ⁴⁹ See Wigand, De comm., 115–17. See Wigand, De comm., 117–22. ⁵¹ Wigand, De comm., 117–18. See Wigand, De comm., 152; see also 135–6. ⁵³ Wigand, De comm., 152. Wigand, De comm., 135, quoting Phil. 2:8.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

177

this case, in contrast to Brenz’s view, predication tracks power-exercise, not power-possession, and the metaphysical genus maiestaticum and the linguistic one again come apart. And Wigand does not construe the distinction between krypsis and kenosis fundamentally in terms of the truth or otherwise of predications in the genus maiestaticum during Christ’s earthly life, but merely (given power-possession) in terms of power-exercise or its absence—hence his claim that his own view is a kryptic one. Of course, given his acceptance of CN-semantics, there are no worries—as there are for Brenz and Andreae—about the Chalcedonian orthodoxy of his position. Granting that Wigand accepts a fundamentality requirement in the genus maiestaticum (though not in the genus idiomaticum), and supposing that he takes power-exercise to be necessary for predication, he accepts the following semantics for the linguistic genus maiestaticum: WGM-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h (or Christ according to h) is φd’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness only if h bears Φd-ness; and h bears Φd-ness iff Christ bears h. The conditional here captures the distinction between the linguistic and the metaphysical genus maiestaticum (as power-exercise and power-possession, respectively). And I say ‘bears h’ in the final conjunct assuming my reading tentatively asserting Wigand’s acceptance of the supposital union, offered at the very beginning of this section, is correct. One thing that stands out is that the truth of these predications seems to be overdetermined: the attributes are predicated of the divine person in virtue of his possessing a divine nature that bears them, and they are also truly predicated of him in virtue of his possessing a human nature that bears them. In this case, the predication is real (on Wigand’s understanding: realf) precisely in virtue of the conjunction of these two claims—such that both natures bear the relevant properties. So overdetermination is required for fundamentality here. If the nature of the relationship between divine attributes and the human nature is left unresolved, so too is any kind of solution to a related issue: the Augustinian problem of divine simplicity. Wigand never mentions Augustinian views on the topic; neither does he mention any of the opposing Greek positions, distinguishing the divine essence from (uncreated) divine activities. So his taxonomy of the divine essence, properties, and actions lacks any kind of theoretical foundation, and remains fundamentally piecemeal. A couple of further points are worth keeping in mind. One is that, as I noted above, Wigand constructs his theory simply on the basis of his reading of various Scriptural testimonies. He does not believe that there is an argument directly from the hypostatic union to the genus maiestaticum. In line with this, he does not discuss (but clearly would not accept) IBS, and, indeed, believes that Christ’s body

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

178

 

is necessarily circumscribed;⁵⁵ but, ‘nevertheless the person, in his body, is wherever he wishes’—multivolipraesentia.⁵⁶ Like Schegk, and before him Hesshus, Wigand is important as an early attempt to envisage the genus maiestaticum independently of its origin in Brenzian communicatio—something that Chemnitz develops in much more detail. His clarification of two senses of ‘communicable’, and his acceptance of CN-semantics, are likewise important for Chemnitz, and Wigand is clearly a significant representative of the kind of non-Brenzian majestic Christology that Chemnitz defends.

5.3 Chemnitz, De Duabus Naturis in Christo (1570) Chemnitz had, as we shall see, a very significant role in drafting the Formula of Concord. He was trained at Wittenberg and spent a considerable portion of his life in Brunswick (Lower Saxony), and there is a sense in which he learnt as much from Melanchthon, his teacher, as he did from Luther.⁵⁷ His De duabus naturis in Christo appeared in two distinct editions, the first in 1570, and the second after the Formula of Concord in 1578. The second edition is rather longer than the first, and differs from it in various ways. I discuss the distinctive features of the second edition in the next chapter. Here I focus on the main contours of Chemnitz’s Christology as laid out in the first edition, since it represents by far the fullest nonBrenzian majestic Christology to have appeared prior to the formula.

5.3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union Chemnitz refuses to offer any kind of ‘technical definition (artificiosa definitio)’ of the hypostatic union, resting content with a ‘popular description (descriptio popularis)’, according to which ‘the divine person . . . assumed a human nature, and made it his own inseparably and perpetually, so that, preserving the difference of natures and their essential properties, one ὑφιστάμενον [i.e. subsistence] is constituted, namely, the one incarnate Christ’.⁵⁸ The description clearly echoes Chalcedon, the creed of which Chemnitz later quotes in its entirety.⁵⁹ He goes on to note that the union thus described grounds predication in concreto.⁶⁰ Of the various analogies for the hypostatic union that he considers, Chemnitz prefers that of the union of soul and body to any other. Soul and body are

⁵⁵ Wigand, De comm., 69–71. ⁵⁶ Wigand, De comm., 196. ⁵⁷ For Chemnitz’s life and work, see J. A. O. Preus, The Second Martin: The Life and Theology of Martin Chemnitz (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1994). ⁵⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. K8v–L1r. ⁵⁸ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F2v. ⁶⁰ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F3r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

179

not themselves persons;⁶¹ in their union, they constitute one person,⁶² while nevertheless remaining individually distinct;⁶³ their properties are not confused;⁶⁴ their union is, like that of fire and iron, the best illustration of the perichoresis of natures in Christ;⁶⁵ they are jointly involved in human activity (like the two natures in Christ’s theandric activity);⁶⁶ and the body gains properties (such as the powers of sensation) from the soul.⁶⁷ But Chemnitz does not reject the pertinence of various Scholastic models. Indeed, it seems as though his reason for preferring the soul–body analogy is not that it is an accurate representation of the metaphysics of the union, but that of all models for the union it includes the most points of analogy (and that, unlike the Scholastic models, it is Scriptural).⁶⁸ In particular, he does not regard the hypostatic union as basic: he grounds it on the supposital union. Thus, Chemnitz holds the claim that the divine person ‘sustains’ the human nature to be true if appropriately construed. He argues that the ‘Scholastic writers . . . did not poorly or inappropriately explain [the genus idiomaticum]’ in holding that ‘concrete terms signify the ὑπόστασις [i.e. hypostasis] or ὑφιστάμενον [i.e. subsistence] in which those natures and their idiomata subsist and are sustained’.⁶⁹ (I will return in a moment to the claim that the idiomata, as well as the human nature, are sustained by the divine person.) Chemnitz cites with approval the view that the divine person sustains the human nature such that the nature would ‘return to nothing unless it were borne ( gestaretur) by the Son of God, by whom it is sustained (sustentatur)’.⁷⁰ Like the later Brenz, Chemnitz contextualizes his account of the hypostatic union in terms of varieties of divine presence in the universe: hypostatic union is not a case of ‘general presence’, and does not take place in the way in which God ‘indwells in the saints’, or in the way in which God gives ‘eternal life’.⁷¹ Neither is it anything like the way the divine persons dwell in each other.⁷² It is a ‘conjunction of natures’ different in kind from all of these.⁷³ What explains this presence is, however, nothing to do with the communicatio: it is simply the supposital union, as we have seen. Chemnitz concurs with the Scholastics about the definition of ‘person’, taking as his starting point the definition of ‘person’ proposed by Richard of St Victor (d. 1173), and supplementing it with standard Scotist elements: The definition of Richard says, ‘Person is the incommunicable subsistence of an intellectual nature’. By ‘incommunicability’ it is meant that a person subsists ⁶¹ See Chenmitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F7v. ⁶³ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F8r. ⁶² See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F8v. ⁶⁵ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. G2r–v. ⁶⁴ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F8r. ⁶⁷ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. G5r–v. ⁶⁶ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. G4r–v. ⁶⁸ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. F5v–F6r, where Chemnitz highlights passages in which the Incarnation is spelled out in terms of a relation between the divine person and a human body: Jn 1:14, 2:21; Col. 2:9; Heb. 2:14, 9:12. ⁶⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. O7r. ⁷¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. E5r. ⁷⁰ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. G7v. ⁷³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. E5r. ⁷² See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. E5v.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

180

 

per se, such that it is not a part of something else, whether essential or integral, and is not sustained by another, or dependent on another, or made such as to inhere in another.⁷⁴

Richard’s definition was intended to supplant that of Boethius (‘person is an individual substance of rational nature’—on which, see the Introduction, section 0.1) on the grounds that both a separated soul and Christ’s human nature would satisfy the earlier definition, and thus (falsely) count as persons.⁷⁵ Incommunicability is supposed to include individuality, and Chemnitz uses Melanchthon’s term ‘massa’ (‘chunk’) to pick out the fact that the assumed nature is an individual thing.⁷⁶ What kinds of sustaining relations does Chemnitz consider? He holds the substance–accident model to capture well the thought that the human nature is sustained by the divine person, and that the nature gives ‘secondary esse’ to the divine person⁷⁷ (i.e. that sustaining the human nature makes it true that the divine person is a human being), but to mislead to the extent that it might suggest that the human nature is an accident that informs (i.e. inheres in) the divine person.⁷⁸ Likewise, ‘the sustaining of the human nature is most beautifully illustrated by the likeness of grafting: how the human nature depends on and is borne by the Word, and accepts gifts from that union, like an inserted branch derives sap from the trunk’.⁷⁹ But, Chemnitz observes, the image is not Scriptural.⁸⁰ One further feature of this account is worthy of note, and that is Chemnitz’s claim, mentioned above, that the sustaining relation extends to the idiomata as well as the human nature. Should we understand this sustaining to amount to bearing—by piggybacking, as in Luther’s account, expressed in LH-semantics? One the one hand, Chemnitz sometimes treats sustaining as a component of the relation between a substance and an accident (as in the previous paragraph); on the other, he thinks of sustaining fundamentally in causal terms (as in the antepenultimate paragraph above). For what it is worth, Chemnitz accepts ⁷⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F7r. The definition is a conflation of various elements of Richard’s discussion in De trinitate IV, cc. 22–3 (ed. Jean Ribaillier, Textes philosophiques du Moyen Age, 6 (Paris: Vrin, 1958), 188–90), itself more or less borrowed from Scotus: see Scotus, Ord. I, d. 23, q. un., n. 15 (Vatican ed., V, 356). ⁷⁵ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F7r–v. ⁷⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. E5r, G6v. On the individuality of the assumed nature, see too fol. F7v. ⁷⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F4r. The language of ‘secondary esse’ is distinctive to Aquinas’s De unione, q. 4, and represents an assertion that Aquinas rejected both earlier and later than De unione: see my Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 63. The position—but not the language—is standard in (nonThomist) later Medieval Christology. ⁷⁸ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F4r. ⁷⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. F4v. Likening the hypostatic union to the grafting of a branch onto a tree is sometimes found in Medieval theology: see e.g. Aquinas, Scriptum super sententiis, III, d. 1, q. 1, a. 1 c. ⁸⁰ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. F4v–F5r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

181

LH-semantics in the 1577 Formula, and CN-semantics in the second edition of De duabus. And, as we shall see, the second edition drops the claim that the person sustains the idiomata as well as the nature, suggesting a genuine and conscious change of mind on the question. On the face of it, then, we should ascribe LHsemantics to the first edition, and understand the sustaining relationship (between the person and the idiomata) accordingly. Having said this, it is admittedly the case that what Chemnitz says explicitly about the semantics of the genus idiomaticum does not determine the issue either way. For example, Chemnitz claims, ‘The properties (idiomata) of the natures in Christ are not only attributed (tribuuntur) to the nature whose propria they are . . . but a property pertaining (conveniens) to one nature is communicated or attributed (tribuitur) to the person, in concreto.’⁸¹ So the properties of a nature can be predicated both of it and of the person that has the nature. But the text does not make clear whether Chemnitz would assert a stronger metaphysical relation between the human propria and the divine person. At one point Chemnitz quotes a catena of texts from Athanasius and Cyril about Christ’s suffering, all of which treat the issue in the way outlined in CN.⁸²

5.3.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum The issue of the genus maiestaticum is altogether more complex. I will sketch out the metaphysics, since this is the focus of Chemnitz’s discussion, and then offer some suggestions as to the semantics that he would accept were he to spell his position out. Chemnitz makes a distinction between created and uncreated gifts: the human nature receives created spiritual and graced gifts as a disposition for the reception of uncreated ones, and these created gifts ‘inhere in the humanity, so that it is informed and perfected by them’.⁸³ In relation to the communication of uncreated properties themselves, Chemnitz takes a very decisive stand on what it is for divine properties to be communicated to the human nature. He follows Andreae’s reductionist account, and holds that the communication amounts to the divine person’s exercise of divine activities through that nature: The question which is most difficult in all this doctrine is: in what way, and for what reason, is there made a communication of those things which Scripture relates Christ’s human nature to have received through the hypostatic union? ⁸¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. M8v–N1r. ⁸² See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Q5r–Q6r. ⁸³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Dd6r; see too fol. Bb1v; for ‘spiritual’, see fol. Aa3r; for ‘graced’ see fol. Z2r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

182

 

I seem to have observed in the testimony of Scripture and in the opinions of the ancients about this doctrine, that, for the sake of showing it, the donation or communication made to the human nature in Christ can be explained very simply in two ways: first, that the essential fullness of the deity wholly inhabits the assumed nature such that in it, with it, and through it, it exercises the works of its divine majesty and power; and secondly, that the divinity, once the most excellent and perfect gifts have been transfused into the assumed nature, so perfects and informs it so that it is made a proper and suitable disposed organ through which the divinity of the Logos exercises its operations.⁸⁴

The second communication is that of created gifts and habits, whose role here is to make the human nature suitably disposed to be an instrument of divine activity. The first is the salient case. The genus maiestaticum consists in the activity of the divine nature causing effects ‘in . . . with . . . and through’ the assumed nature. So at this stage in his thinking Chemnitz understands the genus maiestaticum in terms of activity, not in terms of some kind of divine power borne by the human nature. (Indeed, the only disposition seems to be a created habit or habits.) As we shall see, the second edition seems to adopt a more expressly Brenzian understanding of the communication of divine powers. In a similar discussion, Chemnitz ascribes the divine activity to the relevant attributes: Through the hypostatic union the divine attributes of the Logos inhabit the assumed nature, without confusion, in their complete plenitude, not only by absolute presence, but also such that they stretch themselves out and exercise their operations in, with, and through the assumed nature.⁸⁵

‘Absolute presence’ is the hypostatic presence of the divine nature and attributes in the human nature—the hypostatic union. The second presence—in which the ‘divine attributes of the Logos . . . exercise their operations in, with, and through the assumed nature’—is the genus maiestaticum. (I return in a moment to Chemnitz’s account of UC-ordering; as we shall see, he adopts a partially nonexplanatory version of Wigand’s three-stage account.) In line with this Chemnitz rejects any theory according to which divine attributes might in some sense come to inhere in the assumed nature. He considers two possibilities. According to the first, what comes to inhere in the human nature are the ipsissima divine attributes: The properties or attributes of the divinity are not accidents in a subject, but are the divine essence itself. . . . Therefore the essential properties of the divinity cannot be essentially communicated to anything unless the divine essence is ⁸⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Bb1v. ⁸⁵ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa3r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

183

communicated, like that Father communicated his divine essence and all his properties to the Son. But the humanity in the union is not made the divinity. . . . Therefore it is not in the way that the Logos accepted these things in the generation from the Father that the humanity in the union accepted divine power, majesty and so on. Neither are those things in the human nature of Christ in the way that they are in the divinity of the Logos, such that there is made to be an equalization or equality of the attributes of the divine and human natures in Christ.⁸⁶

As Chemnitz puts it a little earlier, in the rejected interpretation of the communicatio ‘the only difference is that the attributes in the divine nature are natural and essential, whereas in the human nature they are accidental, given, or acquired’.⁸⁷ The second case is one in which what comes in inhere in the human nature are not the ipsissima divine attributes but replicas of divine attributes: To be rejected is the view that the divine nature of the Logos as it were transfuses outside of itself, and into the assumed nature, all the attributes of the divinity, utterly similar and equal in all things to the divine nature, which, separated from the divinity, formally inhere in the human nature as they are in the divinity, such that there is made to be an equalization (exaequatio) and equality (aequalitas) of the divine and human natures in Christ, if not according to essence, then at least according to property and attributes.⁸⁸

The worry here is that the inherence in the human nature of such replica divine attributes would still amount to positing equality between God and the assumed nature. The explicit context of these views is a rebuttal of Schwenckfeld’s supposed view that the human nature gains divine attributes and loses its human attributes altogether.⁸⁹ But one thing that is being denied here is the thought that the divine attributes, even if not the divinity, might come to inhere in the human nature (be ‘in the human nature’), along with certain natural human attributes. And Chemnitz claims that the ‘Württemberg theologians disprove and condemn this opinion . . . in the reply to Beza’⁹⁰—that is to say, in Andreae’s Assertio, where we find the reductionist interpretation of the genus maiestaticum in terms merely of divine activity: the interpretation that, as I have just argued, Chemnitz here accepts. Chemnitz thus has to confront the very problem that caused Andreae such difficulty at Maulbronn: what was the status of the genus maiestaticum during Christ’s earthly life? Since Chemnitz does not believe that the genus maiestaticum constitutes the union, or that it is necessary for the truth of locutions in which divine properties are predicated of the Son of Man, the problem is not as pressing ⁸⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Cc1r–v. ⁸⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Bb2r–v. ⁸⁸ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Bb8v–Cc1r. ⁹⁰ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Bb2v. ⁸⁹ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Bb6r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

184

 

for him as it is for Andreae. Chemnitz’s basic view is that the divine essence and attributes are hypostatically united to the human nature both during Christ’s earthly life and during his Exaltation. But the non-episodic presence of divine activities in the nature—and hence the metaphysical and linguistic genus maiestaticum—is restricted to the Exaltation. So divine properties are properties of the person; whether or not they are manifested depends on whether or not the relevant properties use the human nature as an instrument in divine activity— which some of them do during Christ’s earthly life, and more of them do in the state of exaltation.⁹¹ And if they are not manifested—if the divine person does not use the human nature as an instrument in divine activity—then they are not predicated of the nature (though, of course, they are of the man in the concrete, in virtue of the supposital union). This would amount to (in Lutheran terms) a clearly kenotic account of Christ’s earthly life.⁹² In contrast to the Württemberg theologians, Chemnitz interprets Col. 2:9 (‘in whom dwelt the fullness of the divinity in a bodily way’) to assert not the genus maiestaticum but simply the hypostatic union as such,⁹³ and holds that the hypostatic union is compatible with the failure to use the human nature in divine activity.⁹⁴ As Chemnitz puts, it, the natural human properties ‘prevail and predominate’ during Christ’s earthly life.⁹⁵ That Chemnitz understands the possession of non-exercised divine attributes simply in terms of the hypostatic union, the union of the divine nature and attributes to the human nature—as opposed to their being non-exercised powers of that nature—is made very clear here: ‘The thing itself, or the presence and possession of that thing, is not to be denied if its use and manifestation is suspended for a time. For the humiliation in Christ occurred while the hypostatic union of the two natures was preserved.’⁹⁶ The ‘presence and possession’ of something is here its being united to the human nature in the hypostatic union—something that all sides accept. (As we shall see, the second edition uses the same claim about possession and use to very different ends.) Like Andreae, Chemnitz restricts the list of communicated attributes in the genus maiestaticum to those cases in which the human nature has a role in what is properly speaking simply a divine action that could in principle be achieved without the human nature. This can be seen if we consider just which attributes Chemnitz claims to be communicated in the genus maiestaticum. As already noted, Chemnitz is clear that the divine essence is not communicated—since this would result in the human nature’s actually becoming divine in the way that the Father communicated the divine essence to the Son.⁹⁷ Likewise, the human nature did not receive attributes that would make it ‘a spiritual or ⁹¹ ⁹³ ⁹⁴ ⁹⁵ ⁹⁶

See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Kk2v. ⁹² For a summary of this, see Table 2. See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Ii7v–8r. r See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Ii8 . Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Ii8r; see too fol. Kk2r. ⁹⁷ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa2r. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Kk3r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

185

incorporeal substance’, or ‘a substance neither made nor created, but begotten from the Father’s essence from eternity before all ages; and neither did the Exaltation confer on the human nature of Christ [1] that it was the creator, and [2] things that pertain to the divine nature’.⁹⁸ At various points, Chemnitz lists the following communicated attributes: omnipotence⁹⁹ or infinite power,¹⁰⁰ infinite grace,¹⁰¹ infinite truth,¹⁰² wisdom,¹⁰³ infinite knowledge,¹⁰⁴ infinite justice,¹⁰⁵ multilocation,¹⁰⁶ sanctifying power,¹⁰⁷ and vivifying power.¹⁰⁸ Chemnitz frequently claims that there is no a priori way of generating such a list: it is established solely on Scriptural grounds.¹⁰⁹ (Given that Chemnitz identifies the only disposition for divine activity in the human nature as something created, I take it that ‘power’ here means activity—actually being powerful, as we might say.) Note that the lack of an a priori way of generating such a list results from the absence of any kind of Brenzian communicatio in Chemnitz’s Christology, or even of IBS: principles that would make the question a metaphysical issue.¹¹⁰ Chemnitz contrasts the possession of these attributes by the human nature with the way in which they are possessed by the divine nature: There is a certain communication of the divine essence itself, in two principal ways. 1. Those things which are proper to the divine essence are predicated of the Son of Man in the concrete, that is, they are communicated in the concrete to the person who now subsists in divine and human natures—and nevertheless they are and remain proper to the divine nature alone. 2. Just as fire communicates its essence to the ignited iron, without confusion of substances, and preserving the difference of the natures, so the whole fullness of the divinity dwells in Christ in a bodily way, that is, in his assumed nature, not merely a bare or absolute presence, but through the hypostatic union, and in such a way that he wishes to be known and apprehended there.¹¹¹

The first of these is the hypostatic union of communion of natures, expressed in the genus idiomaticum and predications ‘in natural matter’. In the second, a great deal of work is being done by the analogy to iron and fire. Here is what Chemnitz says elsewhere: The iron inflamed by the fire shines and burns; but there is not one particular and distinct power of the inflamed iron that shines and burns, and another of the fire

⁹⁸ ¹⁰⁰ ¹⁰² ¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁸ ¹⁰⁹ ¹¹⁰ ¹¹¹

Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa1v. ⁹⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. T6r, V1r. ¹⁰¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. V1v, Aa4r. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa4r. ¹⁰³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. V1v. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. V1v, Aa4r. ¹⁰⁵ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa4r. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa4r. ¹⁰⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. V1v. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Ff5r. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. V1v, Cc5r, Cc7r, Ff4v, Hh8r–v. See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Z8v–Aa1r, Ff4r–v. For a summary of Chemnitz’s view, see Table 2. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Aa2r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

186

 

itself, as if there were two distinct, separate, and equal powers that shine and burn, one essential to the fire, and another accidental to the iron. Rather, there is one power in the inflamed iron that shines and burns, which is an essential power of the fire, and is communicated to the iron by union, such that it shines and burns in the iron and through the iron. And the iron inflamed by the fire shines and burns, not by a natural property of its, or by a particular power separated from the fire, but it shines and burns under the substantial power of the fire.¹¹²

The fire does the work; but it does it as united to the iron, so that we can truly predicate the relevant activities of the iron too. The causal ordering is very important (and, as we shall see, is reversed in the more Brenzian second edition): the fire does the work, and while it is true that the iron is characterized by these activities, it is so only in virtue of the fact that it is united to a substance—fire—that bears the relevant powers and is metaphysically responsible for the correlative activities. Here in the penultimate text just quoted, Chemnitz grounds hypostasispredication and the genus maiestaticum on the hypostatic union. We saw above that he grounds the hypostatic union on the supposital union. So we have the following UC-ordering, a variant of Wigand’s: ((supposital union → hypostatic union → hypostasis-as-subject) + genus maiestaticum).¹¹³ The genus maiestaticum is not fully explained by the hypostatic union, since, of course, its absence is compatible with this union (as in the kenosis). Of the various majestic attributes, Chemnitz, perhaps understandably, devotes the most space to the possibility of multi-location or omnipresence. As we have seen, Chemnitz insists that the genus maiestaticum is compatible with the human nature’s possession of its ‘natural’ properties: this is part of the point of his argument against Schwenckfeld.¹¹⁴ So he insists that Christ’s body necessarily exists in a circumscribed way, first on earth, during the earthly ministry, and then in heaven at the Exaltation.¹¹⁵ The natural properties of the body are sufficient only to secure its existing in one place at once.¹¹⁶ But divine power can make the body exist at more than one place, whether circumscriptively¹¹⁷ or noncircumscriptively.¹¹⁸ As Hendrik Klinge has noted, however, Chemnitz at this stage of his career follows Hesshus in refusing to make any explicit link between the omnipotence and omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body.¹¹⁹ There is no ¹¹² Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Cc4r–v; for the use of the analogy, see too e.g. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. E8r, F5r, G2v, T5r, V3v, Cc2v–Cc3r, Dd3v. ¹¹³ For a summary of the various views, see Table 1. ¹¹⁴ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Z2r, Aa1v, Ee5r–Ee7r, Ff3r–Ff4v. ¹¹⁵ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Ff8v–Gg1r. ¹¹⁶ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Gg1v. ¹¹⁷ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Gg2r–Gg4r, Hh1v–Hh3v. ¹¹⁸ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Gg6v–Hh1r. ¹¹⁹ For discussion, see Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart, 262–3. For a summary of the various views, see Table 3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

    - 

187

argument from the claim that Christ’s body has a role in God’s sustaining the whole universe to the claim that the body is omnipresent, and no doctrine of the necessary omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body. Thus, Chemnitz understands ‘the right hand of God’ to signify ‘God’s strength and power’, and claims that the exalted human nature is established (collocata) [there] not by reaching it (attingentiam) . . . but by the hypostatic union. . . . The human nature in Christ is assumed to the communion or sharing (consortium) not only of honour and glory, but of domination and the administration of the reign (regni) of the Messiah.¹²⁰

Chemnitz thus argues that Christ’s body is circumscriptively present in Heaven, and that it can be non-circumscriptively present wherever the divine person uses the human nature as an instrument in properly divine activity.¹²¹ One obvious example of this kind of activity is Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.¹²² Christ’s body can be present wherever he wants,¹²³ and Chemnitz appeals to Luther in support of the view that ‘The Son of God with his assumed body can be wherever he wants whenever he wants, preserving the truth of the body.’¹²⁴ In terms of semantics, Chemnitz endorses locutions of the form ‘the humanity is φd’, and locutions in which the relevant features of the human nature are predicated of the divine person ‘according to the human nature’.¹²⁵ Grounding the former predication is a relation that is spelled out not in terms of bearing but in causal terms (the divine nature causing divine effects by means of the human nature); grounding the latter, I take it, is the former relation along with the divine person’s bearing the human nature (as in the supposital union). Predication tracks activity, and there is no apparent account of powers independent of activity. So this gives us something like the following principle—let me label it CGM₁-semantics: CGM₁-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h (or Christ according to h) is φd’ =def ‘the divine person p exercises Φd-ness in the human nature h’; and p exercises Φd-ness in h only if p bears h. CGM₁-semantics is clearly related to AGM₂-semantics—though in the context of a very different metaphysics of the hypostatic union, since Andreae, rejecting the supposital union, would deny that the divine person bears the human nature. And the conditional makes it clear that incarnation is not sufficient for the relevant

¹²⁰ ¹²¹ ¹²² ¹²³ ¹²⁵

Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Gg6v. See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Gg7r. See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fols. Gg7r, Hh4v–Hh5r. ¹²⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), Hh4v. See Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. Hh7r. Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. V1v; see too e.g. fol. Z3r.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

188

 

kind of activity—in sharp contrast to both BGM-semantics and AGM₁-semantics. (I label the principle ‘CGM₁-semantics’ because it is proper to the first edition of the text. In the second edition, Chemnitz adopts a markedly different view.) In relation to omnipresence, I take it that the thought would be that the divine person can exercise a power to make the exalted body omnipresent (hence omnivolipraesentia—exercising a voluntary power to be omnipresent).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

6 The Formula of Concord and Lutheran Christology in the 1570s

I have described over the last two chapters a variety of Lutheran views most of which accept in some form or another the genus maiestaticum. Some of these Christologies were formed by theologians in the general ambit of Melanchthon’s thought, though diverging from it on the question of the genus maiestaticum; and others by theologians in the Brenzian tradition. But the Wittenberg theologians themselves adhered rigidly to the line of thinking started in Melanchthon’s later work. Given the divergence between these various traditions, intra-Lutheran disagreements in the 1560s and 1570s became somewhat acute. The Formula of Concord (1577) represented an attempt to sort these disagreements out, which it did by finding formulations agreeable to the first two groups (the non-Brenzian and Brenzian adherents of the genus maiestaticum), but incompatible with the beliefs of the third group (the Wittenberg theologians). It is clear that the Wittenberg theologians were a great deal more exercised by the views of the Württemberg theologians than they were by those of the other group of opponents—though it is not obvious to me why this should have been the case. Thus, the principal Wittenberg contribution, the 1574 Grundfest, contains a particularly vitriolic ad hominem criticism of Chemnitz’s work.¹ But, in contrast to the treatment afforded to the positions of the Württemberg theologians, it contains almost nothing substantive on the Christological issues. The major worry of the Wittenberg theologians is merely that Chemnitz’s thinking of both theandric activity and SG-possession as instances of communicatio—as species, in other words, of a genus that also contains the genus idiomaticum—confuses items that should be kept conceptually distinct in a more rigorous way.² So in what follows, I treat the serious dialectic in the debates leading up to the formula as ¹ This text and others on both sides of the debate have been very ably edited and conveniently gathered together in Irene Dignel, ed., Die Debatte um die Wittenberger Abendmahlslehre und Christologie (1570–1574), Controversia et Confessio, 8 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). Except when noted, all quotations and references in this section are from this edition. For the attack on Chemnitz, see Grundfest, 576–91. A detailed discussion of many of these Wittenberg theologians can be found in Hund, Das Wort ward Fleisch. ² See Grundfest, 587.34–588.2; 588.19–21; 590.8–11. Curiously, the Grundfest devotes much more space to Wigand (see Grundfest, 555.15–575.16), focusing principally on the accusation that the genus maiestaticum amounts to an acceptance of Schwenckfeld’s position: a criticism to which, of course, the Württemberg theologians are equally susceptible.

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

190

 

merely two-sided, between Wittenberg and Württemberg, and examine the discussions between the two sides topically, on the basis of a sequence of controversial texts published by the various protagonists between 1570 and 1574. A great part of the dispute leading up to the formula centred on the correct interpretation of Luther, who presented problems for both sides. For the Wittenberg theologians the texts about the omnipresence and majesty of the assumed nature presented an almost intractable difficulty. It is no surprise that the Württemberg theologians quote these texts freely, while the Wittenberg theologians ignore them or try to explain them away as anomalies. But for the Württemberg theologians, following Brenz, the texts from Luther about the distinction between predication in concreto and predication in abstracto are likewise highly problematic, given Luther’s insistence on the distinction as something necessary for a correct understanding of the metaphysics and semantics of the hypostatic union, and given that the Württemberg tradition apparently has no use for the distinction at all. And it is no surprise that the Wittenberg theologians quote these texts, while the Württemberg theologians more or less ignore them, and try to find other texts more congenial to their own approach. Once I have presented the general debate leading up to the formula, I shall give an account of the various parts of the formula itself. And by way of concluding the chapter, I shall examine the second edition of Chemnitz’s De duabus (1578), because positions adopted in the formula make a noticeable difference to some of Chemnitz’s own Christological views.

6.1 Negotiating Luther’s Christological Heritage 6.1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union The metaphysical debate is fundamentally a continuation of the divergence between Melanchthon and Brenz that I outlined in Chapter 2. By and large the Wittenberg theologians repeat—and sometimes quote—Melanchthon’s Scotist account of the supposital union and the definition of ‘person’ (as requiring hypostatic independence).³ (Curiously, the Grundfest employs the soul–body analogy,⁴ and alludes to the supposital union only in passing, in the context of a defence of Melanchthon’s Scotist definition of ‘person’.)⁵ The Wittenberg theologians are fully aware of the identification of the hypostatic union with the genus maiestaticum found in Brenz,⁶ and they argue against this identification in various ways. They claim that to satisfy the requirement that the divine person is the ³ Georg Major, Promotionsthesen, th. 17, 25, 26 (31.18–19, 35.24–6, 36.5–7); Consensus Dresdensis, 808.26–9; Joachim Curaeus, Ex. pers., 1034.19–20. ⁴ Grundfest, 403.21–5. ⁵ Grundfest, 634.11–14. ⁶ See Grundfest, 549.19–26, 650.32–651.171; they ascribe it (wrongly) to Wigand too: see Grundfest, 561.25–562.12, 568.5–15.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

191

subject of all the relevant properties, divine and human, the communicatio must be symmetrical. So if the hypostatic union consists in the genus maiestaticum, then it does not secure the predication of human attributes of the divine person (but merely the ascription of divine attributes of the human nature).⁷ More generally, the genus maiestaticum is a theory of the predication of divine attributes of the human nature. But the hypostatic union requires that both divine and human attributes are predicated in concreto of the divine person. The genus maiestaticum does not secure this latter communicatio, and so cannot constitute the hypostatic union, or ground some kind of theory of the hypostatic union.⁸ The Grundfest adopts many of Beza’s insights outlined in Chapter 4—indeed, it is hard to suppose that the authors did not use parts of the Placida responsio as a model. Like Beza, the authors believe that the Brenzian view is both Nestorian and Eutychian. On the Nestorian side, they argue that any saint—they use the example of the Apostle Peter—participates in ‘divine gifts’,⁹ and thus would, given the view of the Württemberg theologians, count as a divine incarnation—something that the authors of the Grundfest identify as a particularly egregious version of the Nestorian heresy.¹⁰ Equally, the Wittenberg theologians argue that seeing Christ’s human nature as an instrument of divine activity—as in Andreae’s reductionist interpretation of Brenz’s view on the genus maiestaticum—simply amounts to Nestorianism. The idea is that in cases of instrumentality the tool and the agent do not constitute one hypostasis.¹¹ On the Eutychian side, the authors argue straightforwardly that the genus maiestaticum results in the obliteration of the human nature, and is thus—as they point out—indistinguishable from Schwenckfeld’s view.¹² A further consideration likewise derives directly from Beza, and is worth considering at more length, not least since it crops up a little later in the second edition of Chemnitz’s De duabus naturis, likewise against Brenz’s account of the hypostatic union (I number the paragraphs for ease of reference): [1] No Flacian (who thus endorses the real of physical communication) will refute with reason, and truly be able to discern, why it cannot just as well be said of both the Father and the Holy Spirit that the Father and the Holy Spirit became man as the Son of God did (who is the intermediate person of the divinity). [2] For the new writers call the Word’s having communicated to the flesh all of his divine properties ‘becoming man’, or ‘the Word has become flesh’. [3] But the Word or the Son of God, according to the essence of the divine nature, has no other properties than those that the Father and the Holy Spirit have, so the humanity of Christ must not only have been susceptible ( fehig) (for they speak ⁷ ⁸ ¹⁰ ¹²

See Grundfest, 411.15–23; see too Grundfest, 562.13–29. See Grundfest, 561.25–562.30. ⁹ See Grundfest, 650.32. See Grundfest, 650.32–651.17. ¹¹ See Grundfest, 651.18–35. See Grundfest, 653.30–654.30.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

192

 

thus) of the divine property of the Son of God, but also of that of the Father and the Holy Spirit. [4] And because the personal union is what this outpouring (ausgiessung) of the divine properties into the humanity is meant to be, it follows that likewise both the Father and the Holy Spirit became man as the Son of God.¹³

‘Flacian’ in (1) refers to the followers of the Lutheran theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75), and is here a general derogatory term for the opponents of the Wittenberg theologians. (1) puts the general worry: if there is a communication of divine properties to the human nature, then it would seem as though all three persons are incarnate. (2) states the issue more strictly: if the hypostatic union consists in the communication of divine properties, then all three persons will be incarnate. ((1) does not seem obviously true, since it would be possible to imagine the communication of properties to be a consequence of the hypostatic union, and thus to be a consequence of the union to the second person of the Trinity. (2) is the core objection.) And note the claim that the Württemberg theologians are innovators, a frequent trope among the Wittenberg theologians. (4) restates (2) in a more rigorous fashion—and seems, incidentally, to parallel very closely the way in which Beza states the argument: ‘If the personal union is posited in the communication of these properties, what makes it any less the case that you unite the Father and the Holy Spirit personally to our flesh?’¹⁴ Finally, (3) spells out a crucial premise missing from (1), (2), and (4): the divine properties belong equally to all three persons. It also seems to suggest, at least on one reading, something that I have been highlighting thus far: that according to the Württemberg theologians (as here summarized by their opponents) the human nature bears its divine properties—it ‘is susceptible’ of them. The authors of the Grundfest develop this line of thinking in various ways. They argue that the incarnation of all three divine persons entails that all three divine persons suffer.¹⁵ Furthermore the argument to Trinitarian incarnation supposes, reasonably enough, that the divine properties are shared by all three persons, and that we could avoid the undesirable conclusion (that all three divine persons are incarnate) by denying this presupposition. But that would be tritheism—three divine persons with complete sets of divine properties that are distinct from each other.¹⁶ And in any case a substance that is the subject of divine properties is itself a divine person—so the human substance’s being a subject of divine properties would result in that substance’s being a divine person: it would result, in other ¹³ Grundfest, 657.6–20. ¹⁴ Beza, Plac. resp., 86: ‘Si in istarum proprietatum communciatione posita est unio personalis, quid obstat quo minus etiam Patrem et Spiritum sanctum, cum carne nostra peronaliter unias?’; compare ‘Weil die Persönlich vereinigung eben dies ausgiessung der Göttlichen eigenschafften in die Menscheit sein sol, folget, das ebensowol der Vater und heilige Geist als der Son Gottes sey Mensch worden’: Grundfest, 657.17–20. ¹⁵ Grundfest, 657.33–6. ¹⁶ See Grundfest, 658.5–11.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

193

words, in a quaternity of divine persons, not a Trinity.¹⁷ Avoiding this conclusion would require affirming—absurdly—that the divinity borne by the human nature is participated, and is thus an entity distinct from the divinity shared by the Trinity—a kind of replica, had by grace not nature.¹⁸ The Württemberg theologians would certainly deny the last of these criticisms. As we have seen, Brenz goes to some lengths to try to show that the participated divine attributes are just the attributes had by the second person of the Trinity. And they hold that the divine essence can be communicated without that entailing that there is a replica of the divine essence, or that the human nature becomes identical with the divine essence. I think they would have much more difficulty responding to the worry that the identification of the genus maiestaticum with the hypostatic union results in the incarnation of all three persons: indeed, I do not know a place where they address this, and find it hard to think of a response on their behalf. The Württemberg theologians, for their part, mount an attack on any account of the hypostatic union that lacks the genus maiestaticum. By far the fullest account of their views is found in the 1572 Württemberger Bekenntnis composed by Andreae and Lucas Osiander the Elder (1534–1604). Andreae and Osiander say some things that show how they might think of responding to the worry that the genus maiestaticum cannot secure the genus idiomaticum. Their basic insight, repeated a number of times, is that the Wittenberg account—according to which the human nature does not bear divine attributes—has the result that the whole Christ (the Son of God and his human nature) does not bear divine attributes. As the authors put it, the union is just ‘verbal’, not ‘real’: the communicatio fails to be realf, and for the Württemberg theologians any relevant predication that fails to depend for its truth on a realf communicatio is ipso facto false. On this analysis, the Wittenberg position is Nestorian: God bears divine attributes, the man human attributes.¹⁹ So much for the metaphysics. I now turn to an analysis of the semantics. Brenzian communicatio, as understood by its proponents, includes a fundamentality requirement, such that a predication of the form ‘x is φ’ is true only if one of the form ‘x is Φ’ is. Unsurprisingly, the Wittenberg theologians follow Melanchthon in accepting CN-semantics. The authors of the Grundfest define the communicatio idiomatum as ‘a way of speaking such that the properties of one nature are ascribed (zugeschreiben) to the whole person’,²⁰ and go on to give examples of

¹⁷ See Grundfest, 658.12–19. ¹⁸ See Grundfest, 658.19.35. ¹⁹ See Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 911.13–33; see also 894.10–19, 896.1–8, 901.14–33, 905.29–906.4. Andreae makes just the same claim in his 1573 Christological sermon (see Andreae, Sechs Christliche Predig (Tübingen, 1573), 86–7; ET Robert Kolb, Andreae and the Formula of Concord: Six Sermons on the Way to Lutheran Unity (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1977), 113–14). ²⁰ Grundfest, 410.1–3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

194

 

relevant predications in concreto. Elsewhere, the claim that the person does not bear the relevant properties is made clearer: in the communicatio ‘the property of one nature is ascribed to the whole person in concreto, with a name (Namen) by which the person is denoted (angezeiget)’.²¹ None of this means that the Wittenberg theologians deny the truth of predications in the genus idiomaticum. Thus, they are happy to claim that the communication is real (‘realis’) if by ‘real’ is meant realt—namely, that the relevant predication is true: that it is a ‘warhafftige rede’.²² And they object vigorously to the claim of the Württemberg theologians that the genus idiomaticum, as understood by the Wittenberg theologians, is merely ‘verbal’—presumably given the Württemberg reading of ‘verbal’ (i.e. ‘not realt (because not dependent on a realf communicatio)’) as ‘untrue’.²³ Indeed, they regard the whole terminology (‘real’ vs. ‘verbal’) as simply a Württemberg innovation, and clearly prefer not to use it.²⁴ It is evident that the Württemberg theologians have no space for true but nonfundamental predications, and so would be forced to deny the coherence of the Wittenberg position. But if this would be an injustice against the Wittenberg theologians, it is clear that the Wittenberg theologians themselves ascribe to their opponents more than the opponents would affirm. The Wittenberg theologians hold that there is an unacceptable sense of ‘real communication’, held by their opponents in the context of the genus maiestaticum, in which ‘real’ means physical, and ‘physical’ means essential or natural. It is easy to see why: the Württemberg theologians hold that the communicatio is realf; and someone accepting CN-semantics would hold that this belief is monophysite—an objection that we first saw in Calvin. In the unacceptable sense, the humanity would receive divine properties, and this would change its very essence or nature.²⁵ The Württemberg theologians rightly object to this: something can bear a property without thereby altering its nature. For the communication to be realf does not mean that it is real in a stronger sense, such that the nature itself is changed. In his 1572 Bericht vom heiligen Nachtmahl, Osiander argues that Brenz (and Luther too, thereby assimilating the two theologians) spoke of a ‘real but not physical . . . sharing of properties’.²⁶ As the Württemberger Bekenntnis diagnoses the issue, what has gone wrong is an equivocation in the German word ‘wesentlich (essentially)’, which can be rendered in Latin both by ‘realiter (really)’ and ‘essentialiter (physically/naturally)’:²⁷ the former rendition is metaphysically innocuous, signalling merely property-possession; the latter is theologically offensive, suggesting the essential alteration or obliteration of a nature. The ²¹ ²⁴ ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷

Grundfest, 562.26–8. ²² Grundfest, 563.10–14. ²³ Grundfest, 561.4–12. See Grundfest, 616.23–8. See e.g. Major, Promotionsthesen, th. 28 (36.31–5), Grundfest, 561.1–24. Osiander, Bericht, 1000.22–4. Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 920.9–11.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

195

Württemberg theologians maintain merely the former sense, and not, as their opponents imagine, the latter.²⁸ There are two aspects to this dispute, a general one and a specifically theological one. If the Wittenberg theologians think that any realf predication requires changing the nature of the subject, they are clearly mistaken. What is at stake is merely fundamentality vs. non-fundamentality. But the case of divine attributes in relation to a created nature is more substantive: one might be forgiven for thinking that anything that possessed divine attributes, or even anything that was characterized by predicates expressing divine attributes, was literally God.

6.1.2 Predication in Abstracto The participants in this debate on the metaphysics and semantics of the hypostatic union did not relate the issues specifically to questions of the correct interpretation of Luther. But in the remaining two topics that I examine in this section— predication in abstracto and questions of the power and omnipresence of the human nature—Luther-exegesis is central. And both sides have some claim to be the authentic followers of the original Reformer: the Wittenberg theologians on the question of predication in abstracto, and the Württemberg theologians on the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature. On the first of these issues, the Wittenberg theologians quote the relevant passages from Luther, and in particular the Enarratio on Isaiah 53 that contains some of Luther’s most fully developed thought on the question of naturepredication.²⁹ And it is a constant refrain in their narrative that non-trivial Christological predication in abstracto is impermissible other than to express cases in which the natures have their own kind-specific properties.³⁰ One worry that the Wittenberg theologians have is simply connected with the asymmetry of Brenzian communicatio, and the supposed adherence to GMP more generally.³¹ At one point in the 1570 Promotionsthesen, the Wittenberg theologian Georg Major (1502–74) argues against GMP on the grounds that it entails the genus tapeinoticum: ‘The divine nature should not be thought, on the grounds that Christ, God and man, is rightly said to be passible, to be passible; neither for this reason should eternity or infinity be attributed to the human nature, because Christ, God and man, is eternal an infinite.’³² The argument is modus tollens: the ²⁸ See Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 920.31–921.2. ²⁹ See Grundfest, 489.1–490.27. They do not quote the Christological disputations. The disputations themselves were not published, but the lists of theses were, and must have been known to Melanchthon and presumably his followers too. Perhaps they found the discussion in the Enarratio more systematic. ³⁰ See Major, Promotionsthesen, th. 34 (40.13–15); Grundfest, 410.31–411.31, 556.12–20; Curaeus, Ex. pers., 1030.5–6. ³¹ See Major, Promotionsthesen, th. 34 (40.28–41.3). ³² Major, Promotionsthesen, th. 35 (41.3–6).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

196

 

genus tapeinoticum is false, so by parity of reasoning so is GMP and thus the genus maiestaticum, given that the genus maiestaticum is grounded on GMP. Major here ignores the restrictions built into BMP, and depends on BMP’s entailing GMP. And I noted in section 2.3.1, p. 97, that it is not clear whether or not Brenz would accept the entailment. More substantively, at one point in the Grundfest its authors attempt to show that Brenzian communicatio is inconsistent with Chalcedonian orthodoxy: Just as it is given to the man Christ that he is one person with the Son of God, so they [viz. the Württemberg theologians] teach that everything that the Son of God has had from eternity per naturam [i.e. by nature] is also given to and belongs to the Son of Man temporally, per unionis gratiam [i.e. by the grace of union]. As it will now correctly be said that the man Christ is God, so it will also correctly be said that the man Christ is a creator of everything, is omnipotent, is eternal—not according to the human nature, but rather according to the divine, which is personally united with the human nature. Just as it would be incorrect if one were to say that the humanity of Christ is, on account of the personal union, the divinity, so one can also not say that the human nature is, on account of the personal union, a creator of all things, omnipotent, eternal.³³

According to the Grundfest, the various predications are true here if understood in concreto, as referring to the second person of the Trinity. But Brenzian communicatio would understand the predications in abstracto to reference the human nature (referred to as ‘the man Christ’, or ‘the Son of Man’). And if the genus maiesticum—the communication of a divine attribute to the human nature—is required for the truth of predications of the form ‘the man Christ is φd’, then the communication of the divinity to the human nature should be required for the truth of the predication ‘the man Christ is God’. This highlights a deeper problem with Brenzian communicatio, one that I have mentioned several times above: if we understand the semantics of terms signifying the human nature in the way that Brenz does, and if we suppose (as Brenz also does) that not all divine attributes are communicated, then Brenzian communicatio will not secure the truth of all relevant Christological predications: some that are true given Chalcedonian Christology (e.g. ‘the Son of Man is eternal’) are false on Brenz’s semantics. As the text just quoted puts it, ‘it will . . . correctly be said that the man Christ is . . . eternal’, contrary to Brenzian communicatio.³⁴

³³ Grundfest, 598.4–15. ³⁴ It must be said that, while the Wittenberg point about the communicatio idiomatum as such is well taken, these theologians are making things rather too easy for themselves. The Württemberg theologians have an explicit semantics for predications of the form ‘man is God’—that is to say, BSsemantics. And no one in the debate admitted that ‘the humanity is the divinity’, or even that ‘the man is the divinity’, despite the sameness of person and essence in God. The Württemberg theologians’ position is no weaker on this point than that of any other participant in the discussion.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

197

The substantive discussion of Brenz’s own practice in the Württemberger Bekenntnis reveals in more detail how Andreae and Osiander are thinking. They ascribe to Brenz three equivalent ways of predicating Christ’s humanity: ‘[1] “Christ according to his human nature is exalted to the majesty and power of God”; [2] “The human nature in Christ is exalted to the majesty and power of God”; which two locutions denote as much as this one, [3] “The Man Christ is exalted to the eternal majesty and power of God,” ’³⁵ and note, That Herr Brenz used the first two of these more than the third did not happen without reason, to reveal thereby the deception of the Zwinglians, which they use under the term ‘concrete’. The Zwinglians certainly like to permit one’s saying in concreto ‘the man Christ is omnipotent and knows everything, even the thoughts of human beings’, but this means for them no more than ‘The divinity, which is in the man Christ, is omnipotent, knows all things, and knows the thoughts of our hearts.’ But when one asks further, ‘has the Son of God truly shared his omnipotence with his human nature, so that his human nature does not merely have the bare name, but rather the whole Christ, God and Man, is truly omnipotent and knows things not merely as God, but also knows all things according to his humanity (which is a man) through and with which human nature the Son of God operates every activity of his omnipotence?’, the Zwinglians say ‘no’ to this.³⁶

The comment about Brenz’s own usage is, as far as I can make out, mistaken. Brenz prefers the third locution to the second (since it is an instance of Brenzian communicatio, central to Brenz’s Christology), and only uses the first very infrequently—and when he does, treats it as equivalent to the third. But, presumably, the authors’ own substantive claim is that the first two locutions show it to be not just the divine person but also the human nature that is subject of the relevant predications. On their analysis the third locution is ambiguous between their interpretation—which is that the whole Christ is the subject of the various predications—and that of the Wittenberg theologians, who (according to our authors here) hold that only the divine nature is the subject of these predications. Here, then, we see a clear statement of Brenz’s BMP, along with a belief that CN-semantics requires the restriction of divine predicates to the divine nature, on the grounds that they are in some sense had by the nature and not the incarnate person (again, presupposing a fundamentality requirement for truth). The Wittenberg theologians, of course, would reject this: as they see it, the whole point of predication in concreto is that non-trivial predicates are ascribed to the divine person.

³⁵ Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 915.18–22. ³⁶ Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 915.26–39.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

198

 

6.1.3 Power and Bodily Omnipresence If the Württemberg theologians can find scant support in Luther for their views on the communicatio in general, they have much more material to work with in relation to their views on bodily omnipresence specifically. Like Brenz, they quote at length relevant passages from the anti-Zwinglian writings of the 1520s, and assume that Luther and Brenz are in agreement on the issue.³⁷ They also quote early works (1530 and before) of Melanchthon’s.³⁸ Luther was a shared authority, and the Württemberg theologians see no need to say anything on the issue of omnipresence other than quote the relevant Luther texts. Clearly, the situation is far more complex for the Wittenberg theologians. They never quote from Luther’s Eucharistic treatises of the 1520s, and only rarely offer any comment on the fact that Luther clearly asserted omnipresence in these works. At one point, Joachim Curaeus (1532–73) notes rather stoically, Because he [viz. Luther] sometimes, as a result of his fervour (ardore), occasionally added—to speak very gently—something ἄκυρον [i.e. lacking authority], or even spoke without the greatest caution, let us attribute this to the weakness (imbecillitati) common to all human beings, which is great even in the most excellent ones (praestantissimis).³⁹

The Wittenberg theologians claim that Luther based the Eucharistic presence not on omnipresence but on omnipotence, accepting a kind of multivolipraesentia without any attempt to specify the metaphysics, much like the later Melanchthon.⁴⁰ They treat the issue simply as a mystery, to be believed merely on the basis of divine testimony—and they point out that Luther sometimes says much the same. For example, they note that his use of Scholastic modes of presence in Vom Abendmahl was something that he did not repeat later, and they propose a very complex interpretation of the dialectical context for Luther’s discussion: he used the Scholastic distinctions ‘solely to refute several inconsistent and not sufficiently explained objections to the opposite’—where the ‘objections’ are supposed Zwinglian ones to the effect that Luther’s view spiritualizes the body (in the later manner of Schwenckfeld).⁴¹ So what the Wittenberg theologians suppose Luther to be doing is offering a way of affirming that the body is a genuine body even if it is capable of being present non-spatially in the Eucharist. In support of their overall strategy, the Wittenberg

³⁷ For relevant quotations, see Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 851.16–852.25, 859.25–861.11, 888.3–12, 936.2–24; for the assimilation of the two views, see Osiander, Bericht, 998.27–999.4, 1007.12–25, 1008.30–2. ³⁸ Andreae and Osiander, Württemberger Bekenntnis, 944.28–947.3. Some of the same early texts are quoted in the 1571 Niedersächsisches Bekenntnis authored under the guidance of Chemnitz: see 778.23–779.3. ³⁹ Curaeus, Ex. pers., 1054.37–40. ⁴⁰ See Grundfest, 558.16–22. ⁴¹ Grundfest, 547.4–13; see too Consensus Dresdensis, 817.22–32.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

199

theologians cite texts against omnipresence from the later Melanchthon.⁴² And they (in my view most probably rightly) interpret Luther’s claims about the power of Christ’s exalted human nature fundamentally in terms not of metaphysical power but of moral and spiritual authority.⁴³ The Wittenberg theologians generally argue against the possibility of bodily omnipresence on the kinds of grounds we have already encountered: that omnipresence is incompatible with the nature of a body, and that the resultant Christology is thus Eutychian.⁴⁴ And if omnipresence is incompatible with the nature of a body, it follows that the Eucharistic presence posited by the Württemberg theologians cannot be the presence of a genuine body at all, contrary to the requirements of the theory.⁴⁵ In earlier chapters, we have encountered the anti-Scholastic view that lack of extension is incompatible with the nature of a body. Curaeus spells out far more explicitly a possible metaphysical foundation for this claim. He maintains that a body’s extension should not be thought of as an accident at all. Rather, a body’s extension in three dimensions consists in ‘the intrinsic location of its parts’.⁴⁶ It is a feature that ‘pertains primarily and properly to the substantial form of the body’⁴⁷ and is not something accidental; and it belongs to a body not merely by nomological necessity but logical necessity (‘necessary not by physical necessity, but by the necessity of definition’).⁴⁸ Curaeus gives the helpful example of a triangle: it is necessary by definition that a triangle has three and only three angles—it is what we would call an analytic truth.⁴⁹ Likewise, it is an analytic truth—even if not an a priori one, as in the triangle example—that a human body is extended in three dimensions. One argument employed by the proponents of omnipresence from Luther onwards is that Christ’s body was able to collocate with other bodies, and that the most natural explanation of this—one that derives from Scholastic theology— is that the body at that time existed without extension (conceived of as the bar to collocation).⁵⁰ (I mentioned Luther’s deployment of these kinds of case in section 1.2.1.1, pp. 63–4.) Curaeus provides a different account, one compatible with his belief that extension is necessary to a body: Did a body then lose its dimensions? Not at all. Rather, the quality of the body’s texture was changed: that is, from what was dense something more rarefied was

⁴² See e.g. Wittenberger Katechismus, 204–5 (marginal comments); Curaeus, Ex. pers. 1027.19–20, 1059.1–7. ⁴³ See e.g. Grundfest, 440.33–441.3. ⁴⁴ See e.g. Grundfest, 533.7–31; Consensus Dresdensis, 820.30–821.2. ⁴⁵ See e.g. Grundfest, 559.12–24; Consensus Dresdensis, 821.21–6. ⁴⁶ Curaeus, Ex. pers. 1066.27–8. ⁴⁷ Curaeus, Ex. pers. 1066.24–5. ⁴⁸ Curaeus, Ex. pers. 1066.29–30. ⁴⁹ Curaeus, Ex. pers. 1066.34–7. ⁵⁰ Curaeus sets out the position at Ex. pers. 1067.31–4.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

200

 

made, so that it could give way [to the other body], just as the surrounding air gives way to our bodies, while nevertheless remaining a body.⁵¹

There are Medieval precedents for this view, though I do not think it was common.⁵² Curiously, many Medieval thinkers would agree that extension—the internal ordering of a body’s parts—is indeed a metaphysically necessary feature of a body, while denying that extension entails circumscriptive location.⁵³ But Curaeus does not consider this view, and perhaps did not know it.

6.2 The Formula of Concord (1577/1580) The final printed page of the Wittenberg theologians’ Grundfest includes, just above the colophon, the following epigram: ‘The gates of Hell shall not prevail against it’ (Mt 16:18).⁵⁴ The Formula of Concord, composed in 1577 and published in 1580, would come to represent for the Wittenberg theologians the catastrophic failure of that orison. It seems clear that the outcome was as much political as it was theological: and to the extent that it was theological, what was decisive for the Christological outcome was the authority of Luther and his distinctive teachings about omnipresence.⁵⁵ Thus, the formula cites almost all the relevant anti-Zwinglian texts from Luther on alloiosis and bodily omnipresence. The composition of the formula was led by Andreae and Chemnitz, with Andreae composing the text of the brief Epitome, and Chemnitz being largely responsible for the text of the more expansive Solida declaratio. The difference is immediately apparent, as we shall see: the Epitome speaks of an assumed man, and presupposes Brenzian communicatio; the Solida declaratio proceeds along far more conventional lines.⁵⁶ Andreae, in the Epitome, describes the communicatio idiomatum as follows: Here is the most complete communion, which God truly has with the man (dem Menschen); from which personal union, and the most complete and indescribable communion that results from it, flows everything human that be ascribed to

⁵¹ Curaeus, Ex. pers. 1069.7–10. ⁵² Scotus discusses (and rejects) a similar view at Rep. IV, d. 49, q. 15 (printed as Ord. IV, d. 49, q. 16, n. 4 (Wadding ed., X, 612)). ⁵³ See e.g. Scotus, Ord. IV, d. 10, p. 1, q. 1, nn. 61–73 (Vatican ed., XII, 72–6). ⁵⁴ Grundfest, 673.3. ⁵⁵ For a brief discussion of the processes that led to the adoption of the formula by a majority of the Lutheran Churches in Germany, see Arand, Kolb, and Nestigen (eds.), The Lutheran Confessions, 255–80. ⁵⁶ Jörg Baur has emphasized the place of the formula as a ‘synthesis’ of the Christologies of Chemnitz, on the one hand, and Brenz and Andreae, on the other: see Einsicht und Glaube: Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 189–205; Luther und seine klassischen Erben, 117–44. It seems to me, for reasons that will quickly become evident, that the two parts of the formula, even if not formally incompatible, are in considerable tension with each other, precisely because of the great divergence between Chemnitz and advocates of broadly Brenzian Christologies.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

201

and believed about God, and everything divine that can be ascribed to and believed about the man Christ.⁵⁷

Here we have Brenzian communicatio: what is united to God is properly referred to as ‘man’, and this man in some sense receives divine attributes just as the divine person receives human attributes. God and man are the same* person, and this communion is identified as ‘the personal [i.e. hypostatic] union’. The text does not state expressly whether some or all of the divine attributes (and essence) are communicated in the required way (the central formulation is ‘everything . . . that can be ascribed’): to the extent that Andreae supposes that only some are—which I shall argue below to be the case—this formulation would be incompatible with claims about hypostasis-predication implied in the Solida declaratio. Elsewhere, the Epitome makes it clear that the item that becomes the same* person as the Son of God is the human nature: We also believe, teach, and confess that no mere man suffered, died, was buried, descended into hell, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and was exalted to the majesty and almighty power of God for us, but rather it was a man whose human nature has such a profound, indescribable union and communion with the Son of God, that this human nature is one person with the Son of God.⁵⁸

The UC-ordering in the first text here is not quite clear. It seems as though the hypostatic union (the ‘personal union’) is both identified as ‘the most complete communion’ and is something from which this ‘most complete and indescribable communion . . . results’. Perhaps this second communion should be identified as the communicatio idiomatum. If so, we have a conventional, early Brenzian, twostage explanatory UC-ordering: (sameness* of person → (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticumB)). The text, however, is equally amenable to the following three-stage account: (sameness* of person → communion of natures → (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticumB)). But it is not clear how the second of these stages would be distinct from the first, and on the face of it, since the Epitome is supposed to be a summary of uncontroversial views, we should read the text as identifying the communion of natures with sameness* of person: the twostage ordering. Equally, the text talks about things ‘ascribed to’ and ‘believed about’ God and man, and this suggests that what is at stake is the linguistic communicatio. But as we will see, in the Epitome the linguistic genus maiestaticum and the metaphysical come apart, and only the metaphysical one is necessitated by ⁵⁷ Epitome, VIII, §9 (in Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche hersausgegeben im Gendenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930, 12th edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 806a.11–18; Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, new edition, ed. Irene Dingel and others (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 1270.3–7; ET The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 510, slightly altered). ⁵⁸ Epitome, VIII, §13 (807a.1–10; Dingel, 1270.22–7; Kolb and Wengert, 511, slightly altered).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

202

 

the union as such. Either view of the UC-ordering, incidentally, is very different from the two-stage account Andreae offered in the 1560s.⁵⁹ Among the propositions rejected in the Epitome are the following: 6. That it is only an expression (phrasis) or modus loquendi, that is, only a matter of words or a way of speaking, when it is said: God is man, and man is God; for the deity has nothing in common with the humanity, and the humanity nothing with the deity in reality, that is, in fact. 7. That it is merely a communicatio verbalis [i.e. a verbal communication] that is, nothing more than a figure of speech, when it is said that the Son of God died for the sins of the world, or that the Son of Man has become almighty.⁶⁰ The deity here is the divine person; the humanity is the human nature, identified as the Son of Man: that is, the item which, as we have seen, is united to the divine person. The seventh rejected thesis here reveals Andreae’s Brenzian communicatio very clearly. The relevant locutions are ‘the Son of God died’ and ‘the Son of Man has become almighty’. For the first of these to be a merely ‘verbal’ predication would be an instance of CN-semantics: the Son of God did not bear the relevant property (dying), but bore the nature that died. So this clause rejects CNsemantics in favour of something else—presumably either LH-semantics or BHsemantics, as the only live options. The second locution is distinctively Brenzian, referring to the human nature as ‘the Son of Man’. This is inconsistent with LHsemantics, since LH-semantics presupposes that ‘Son of Man’ vel sim. signify the person, not the nature. So we should understand the predication in accordance with BGM-semantics, or something related to it: the Son of Man, the human nature, the same* as the divine person, is the recipient of divine attributes via the genus maiestaticumB. The seventh thesis provides the correct interpretation of the sixth: it is not the deity but the divine person that receives human properties; and, likewise, it is the humanity, not the divine person, that receives divine properties.⁶¹ The parallel treatments in the Solida declaratio provide a very striking contrast, and quickly reveal the tensions that exist between the two Christological parts of the formula: There are three strong, irrefutable arguments that prove that the communication of these attributes is to be understood not per phrasin aut modum loquendi (that is, with words alone)—that is, of the person simply according to the divine nature—but also according to the assumed human nature. 1. First, it is a clear rule shared by the entire ancient, orthodox church that whatever Christ received in time according to the testimony of Holy Scripture he ⁵⁹ For a summary, see Table 1. ⁶⁰ Epitome, VIII, §§25–6 (809a.41–810a.12; Dingel, 1274.21–1276.2; Kolb and Wengert, 512, slightly altered). ⁶¹ For a summary, see Table 2.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

203

received not according to the divine nature but according to the human nature (according to which he had all things from eternity), but that the person received it in time ratione et respectu humanae naturae (that is, according to the assumed human nature). . . . 3. Third, Scripture says this not only in general regarding the person of the Son of Man but refers specifically to the assumed human nature. . . . Thus according to John 6[:48–58] the flesh of Christ is a food that gives life.⁶²

At issue here is merely the genus maiestaticum. ‘Son of Man’ refers not to the human nature (as in the Epitome) but simply to the divine person. In particular, note the distinction, in the third paragraph, between ‘the person of the Son of Man’ (appositive genitive) and ‘the assumed nature’, in sharp contrast to the treatment in the Epitome. Given this, how should we interpret the rejection of a merely verbal predication in the first paragraph? On the face of it, it has nothing to do with a rejection of CN-semantics as such (as the parallel discussion does in the Epitome, the third text discussed in this section). It seems rather to reflect merely a fundamentality requirement, as in Wigand: namely, that predications in the genus maiestaticum have both natures as in some sense possessors of divine attributes, such that in virtue of the human nature’s bearing them we can predicate these attributes of the divine person. In line with this fundamentality requirement, what the Solida declaratio says elsewhere seems to push in favour not of CN-semantics but LH-semantics for the genus idiomaticum. The reason for thinking this is that at one point the Solida declaratio expressly commits itself to the claim that, at least in the genus idiomaticum, a predication of the form ‘x is φ’ is true only if a predication of the form ‘x is Φ’ is true. The authors suppose their (Wittenberg) opponents to ascribe divine properties merely to the divine nature, and human properties merely to the human nature,⁶³ and quote Luther’s discussion of Zwingli’s alloiosis in support of this analysis.⁶⁴ And like the Württemberg theologians, they conclude that locutions in the genus idiomaticum are, according to their opponents, ‘simply a praedicatio verbalis, that is, simply mere words, which are not in fact true’.⁶⁵ This sounds like an acceptance of LH-semantics for the genus idiomaticum, understanding Zwingli to ‘exclude’ human properties ‘from the divinity’—i.e. the divine person.⁶⁶ According to this the divine person bears his human properties. ⁶² Solida declaratio, VIII, §§56–7, 59 (1034a.38–1035a.14, 21–5, 34–6; Dingel, 1528.15–23, 28–30, 35–6; Kolb and Wengert, 626). ⁶³ Solida declaratio, VIII, §38 (1029a.6–8; Dingel, 1520.29–30; Kolb and Wengert, 623). ⁶⁴ Solida declaratio, VIII, §§39–43 (1029a.17–1030a.35; Dingel, 1522.1–34; Kolb and Wengert, 623–4), quoting Luther, Vom Abendmahl (WA, XXVI, 319.29–40, 321.19–28, 322.20–2, 324, 25–35; LW, XXXVII, 208–9, 210, 212–13). ⁶⁵ Solida declaratio, VIII, §45 (1031a.20–2; Dingel, 1524.10–11; Kolb and Wengert, 624, slightly altered). ⁶⁶ Solida declaratio, VIII, §43 (1030a.20–2; Dingel, 1522.26–7; Kolb and Wengert, 623), quoting Luther, Vom Abendmahl (WA, XXVI, 324.28; LW, XXXVII, 213).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

204

 

I assume that the preference for LH-semantics was an attempt—albeit unsuccessful—to introduce some kind of coherence into the relevant parts of the formula, given the resemblance, in terms of fundamentality, between LHsemantics and Andreae’s BH-semantics. So the Epitome affirms Brenzian communicatio, and the Solida declaratio a combination of LH-semantics (for the genus idiomaticum) and some kind of fundamentality requirement for the genus maiestaticum too (I return in a moment to the semantics for this latter genus). Of course, both views—that of the Epitome and that of the Solida declaratio— are inconsistent with the view of the Wittenberg theologians, according to which the divine person has these attributes in virtue of his divine nature (something that all sides to the debate accept), but not in virtue of his human nature. And perhaps that is all that the formulators were looking for. But the inconsistencies nevertheless strike me as sufficiently sharp to make one wonder about the coherence of the formula as a whole. Where the Epitome speaks of the personal union of natures⁶⁷ in terms of the union of the Son of God and the Son of Man, the Solida delaratio speaks of the union of natures simply as the personal union of the divine and human natures, signified in abstracto.⁶⁸ Someone minded to understand the union in this latter way would be very likely to reject the view outlined in the Epitome. Similarly, the account of the communion of natures in the Solida declaratio is quite different from that in the Epitome. As in his discussion from 1570, Chemnitz seems to identify the communion of natures with the hypostatic union: ‘the divine and human natures in the person of Christ are so united that they have a genuine communion with each other, by which . . . the natures are not mixed together into one essence but into one person’;⁶⁹ ‘the union and communion between the divine and human natures in the person of Christ is ineffable, a much different and higher [union than that of water and honey]’.⁷⁰ But he does not interpret the hypostatic union—and thus the communion of natures—in terms of Brenz’s sameness* relation. And unsurprisingly the Solida declaratio says nothing explicitly about the ground of the hypostatic union, since Chemnitz’s view on the matter (the supposital union) was obviously known to him to be rejected by the Brenzians, and in any case the supposital union is not part of the dogma but simply an attempt to explain it. This difference reveals itself very clearly in what the two parts of the formula say about the genus maiestaticum during Christ’s earthly life. The Epitome states that ‘according to the personal union he always possessed this majesty, and yet dispensed with it in the state of his humiliation’.⁷¹ Here we have the metaphysical ⁶⁷ Epitome, VIII, §5 (805a.14–15; Dingel, 1268.12; Kolb and Wengert, 509–10). ⁶⁸ Solida declaratio, VIII, §§19–20 (1023a.18–21, 31–2; Dingel, 1514.4–5, 12; Kolb and Wengert, 619). ⁶⁹ Solida declaratio, VIII, §17 (1022a.31–8; Dingel, 1512.22–5; Kolb and Wengert, 619). ⁷⁰ Solida declaratio, VIII, §19 (1023a.22–5; Dingel, 1514.6–8; Kolb and Wengert, 619, altered). ⁷¹ Epitome, VIII, §16 (807a.33–4; Dingel, 1272.4; Kolb and Wengert, 511).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

205

genus maiestaticum, since the ‘personal union’ necessarily involves the human nature’s possession of (some) divine properties. For the Solida declaratio, contrariwise, the personal union is simply the union of natures as such: the hypostatic union is not interpreted in terms of sameness* of person, and the fact that ‘the human nature in Christ has received this majesty according to the mode of the personal union’ simply means that the human nature is united to the relevant divine attributes just as it is united to the divine nature.⁷² There is, in short, during Christ’s earthly life no (non-episodic) genus maiestaticum in the sense I have been using the term. And the claim that these attributes are not always ‘used’ during Christ’s earthly life (‘he kept it [viz. the majesty] secret in his state of humiliation, and did not use it all the time but only when he wanted to’)⁷³ means that the human nature was hypostatically united to the divine attributes, but that there was no correlative (non-episodic) power-possession or power-exercise: in short, no metaphysical or linguistic genus maiestaticum.⁷⁴ This difference, in turn, has an effect on the understanding of the exercise of the relevant powers in the Exaltation. Both parts assert Christ’s human nature had the relevant majestic properties from the moment of the Incarnation—albeit in the different ways just outlined.⁷⁵ But, according to the Epitome, at the Exaltation, He [viz. the Son of Man] was again invested with the full use, revelation, and demonstration of his divine majesty and entering into his glory, in such a way that he knows everything, is able to do everything, is present for all creatures, and has under his feet and in his hands all that is in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, not only as God but also as human creature.⁷⁶

This passage is contrasted with the state of affairs during Christ’s earthly life. So I assume that, while these attributes are predicated at the Exaltation, they are not to be so during Christ’s earthly life. Power-possession without power-exercise, then, is not sufficient for predication, and the powers are not exercised nonepisodically during Christ’s earthly life. To the extent that Andreae accepts the nature’s possession of divine causal powers, he rejects his earlier reductionism about the genus maiestaticum, just as he did at Maulbronn. He asserts that that the assumed man ‘share[s] in the omnipotence of God’,⁷⁷ such that ‘the Son of God . . . perform[s] all the works of his omnipotence in, through, and with his human nature’,⁷⁸ and that he is ‘capable of exercising this omnipotence and other

⁷² Solida declaratio, VIII, §64 (1038a.11–13; Dingel, 1532.20–2; Kolb and Wengert, 628). ⁷³ Solida declaratio, VIII, §26 (1025a.30–3; Dingel, 1516.29–30; Kolb and Wengert, 621). ⁷⁴ For a summary, see Table 2. ⁷⁵ See too Epitome, VIII, § 16 (807a.33–4; Dingel, 1271.4; Kolb and Wengert, 511); Solida declaratio, VIII, § 26 (1025a.26–8; Dingel, 1516.26–7; Kolb and Wengert, 621). ⁷⁶ Epitome, VIII, §16 (808a.3–13; Dingel, 1272.9–14; Kolb and Wengert, 511). ⁷⁷ Epitome, VIII, §35 (811a.28–30; Dingel, 1276.34–5; Kolb and Wengert, 513). ⁷⁸ Epitome, VIII, §33 (811a.9–13; Dingel, 1276.24–6; Kolb and Wengert, 513).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

206

 

characteristics of his divine nature according to his human nature’.⁷⁹ But this instrumentality is explained in terms of divine power-possession, else there is nothing to be possessed in the absence of use. And what Andreae affirms here seems to be in line with his account at Maulbronn, including an acceptance of AGM₂-semantics. The Solida declaratio uses Andreae’s language: Therefore there is and remains in Christ only one single, divine omnipotence, power, majesty, and glory. They are the characteristics only of the divine nature; they shine forth, reveal, and show themselves fully, but spontaneously, in, with, and through the exalted assumed human nature in Christ.⁸⁰

In virtue of this divine action, we can predicate the relevant activities of the human nature too: To give life, to execute all judgement, and to possess all power in heaven and on earth, to have all things in his hand, to have everything subjected to him under his feet, or to cleanse people from the sins, etc., are not created gifts, but divine, infinite characteristics. According to the statements of Scripture these are given to and imparted to the man Christ.⁸¹

(‘The man Christ’ here means Christ according to his human nature, I assume.) And this activity is restricted to the Exaltation: ‘After [his earthly life] he [viz. Christ according to his human nature] . . . ascended far above all heavens, truly fills all things, and now rules everywhere, from one sea to the other and to the end of the world, not only as God but also as man.’⁸² (Note here the apparent affirmation of the omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body: something I return to in a moment.) But there is no talk of power-possession here, which suggests that the Solida declaratio, in contrast to the Epitome, accepts Andreae’s reductionism about the genus maiestaticum, and restricts it—the linguistic and the metaphysical alike—to Christ’s Exaltation. As in the first edition of Chemnitz’s De duabus—and in sharp contrast to the second, as we shall see—the Solida declaratio understands the fire–iron analogy in terms of the fire’s causing effects through the iron. And this is on the face of it the reading we would expect given an acceptance of Andreae’s earlier reductionism.⁸³ I assume, then, taking all this together, that the Solida declaratio accepts CGM₁-semantics. Even though the two parts disagree about the metaphysical genus maiestaticum during Christ’s earthly life, there is agreement that the linguistic genus

⁷⁹ Epitome, VIII, §34 (811a.16–19; Dingel, 1276.28–30; Kolb and Wengert, 513). ⁸⁰ Solida declaratio, VIII, §66 (1039a.4–11; Dingel, 1534.1–5; Kolb and Wengert, 628). ⁸¹ Solida declaratio, VIII, §55 (1034a.18–26; Dingel, 1528.3–7; Kolb and Wengert, 626, slightly altered). ⁸² Solida declaratio, VIII, §27 (1025a.35–40; Dingel, 1516.32–5; Kolb and Wengert, 621). ⁸³ Solida declaratio, VIII, §64 (1038a.24–5; Dingel, 1532.28; Kolb and Wengert, 628); §66 (1039a.7–23; Dingel, 1534.1–2; Kolb and Wengert, 629).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

207

maiestaticum is restricted to Christ’s Exaltation. But even this consensus occludes a further radical difference. Both parts of the formula concur with the claim that the human nature bears divine attributes, and they agree that these attributes are nevertheless not predicated of the human nature during Christ’s earthly life (because predication tracks power-exercise, and the powers are not exercised other than episodically). But Brenzian communicatio requires that attributes that are not predicated of the human nature are not predicated of the Son of Man either. The Solida declaratio, contrariwise, includes all such predications in concreto under the genus idiomaticum, and they can thus be true of the Son of Man even if false of the human nature. And this is a very striking difference, taking the Epitome (like Andreae’s efforts at Maulbronn) even further away from Chalcedonian orthodoxy than Brenz and his earlier self (since on the view adumbrated in the Epitome the range of predications true of the Son of Man during Christ’s earthly life is even more restricted than it is for Brenz). Thus far I have largely identified differences between the two parts of the formula. In many other respects, however, the two seem to be in agreement. I shall focus on these (though not exclusively) for the rest of the section. Both parts of the text reject the view that, as the Epitome puts it, there is ‘some sort of essential, shared power and characteristic, which has been separated from God and poured out into the human nature’.⁸⁴ As the authors of the Solida declaratio point out, there is no reason to suppose that sharing of attributes means that the one doing the sharing has to lose the attributes.⁸⁵ Neither does the human nature’s possession of omnipotence mean that the nature is essentially omnipotent (it is not ‘an omnipotent essence’, and does not ‘possess the characteristic of omnipotence in and of itself ’).⁸⁶ The authors deny, too, that the divine essence and attributes are communicated in the way that the divine essence is communicated to the Son.⁸⁷ The human nature is omnipotent, presumably, but only accidentally so, as a non-necessary consequence of its union with the divine person. In this sense, the authors deny a ‘physical communication or essential transfusion’: the essence of the human nature remains, while the nature gains additional accidental properties.⁸⁸ As I have just shown, the Solida declaratio expressly accepts the omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body, and I return to this in a moment. The Epitome makes just the same claim. Thus, it condemns the view that it is ‘impossible for Christ, because of the characteristics of the human nature, to be in more than one place at the same time—much less to be bodily present in all places’.⁸⁹ This gets us ⁸⁴ ⁸⁵ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁸ ⁸⁹

Epitome, VIII, §27 (810a.16–20; Dingel, 1276.4–7; Kolb and Wengert, 512). Solida declaratio, VIII, §71 (1040a.43–1041a.5; Dingel, 1536.7–11; Kolb and Wengert, 629–30). Solida declaratio, VIII, §71 (1041a.14–16; Dingel, 1536.16–17; Kolb and Wengert, 630). Solida declaratio, VIII, §61 (1036a.16–24; Dingel, 1530.14–19; Kolb and Wengert, 627). Solida declaratio, VIII, §63 (1037a.19–28; Dingel, 1532.3–8; Kolb and Wengert, 628). Epitome, VIII, §30 (810a.30–4; Dingel, 1276.14–15; Kolb and Wengert, 513).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

208

 

possible omnipresence. A similar point is made here: ‘He can exercise his power in all places as present, he can do everything, and he knows all things.’⁹⁰ A slightly later thesis suggests something a bit stronger, that ‘The Son of God . . . perform[s] all the work of his omnipotence in, through, and with his human nature’, and contrasts this with the false view that he performs ‘only a few and exclusively in the place in which his human nature is’,⁹¹ which seems to imply factual (though not necessary) omnipresence. So in the Epitome, Christ’s exalted body is factually omnipresent. The Solida declaratio affirms the same thing. In addition to the passage just quoted (‘[Christ according to his human nature] . . . ascended far above all heavens, truly fills all things’), the text cites Luther’s use of the various modes of presence discerned by the Schoolmen, including Luther’s claim that Christ’s body ‘can be [definitively] present in and with created things’, and ‘[is] present in all created things according to the exalted third mode’, that is to say, repletively.⁹² This seems to be a reference to the Exaltation (note the present tense). Earlier the authors cite Luther to the effect that ‘according to the third supernatural mode, he is and can be wherever God is and . . . everything is full of Christ through and through, even according to his humanity’.⁹³ And again this seems to be just another reference to the Exaltation—but I shall say more about this in a moment.⁹⁴ So the two parts of the formula agree on the factual omnipresence (and not just omnivolipraesentia) of Christ’s exalted human body. The situation is slightly different, however, in relation to bodily omnipresence during Christ’s earthly life. One way of securing such omnipresence is by making it a necessary consequence of the Incarnation. The Solida declaratio quotes the entire text from Vom Abendmahl that includes IBS (and part of which I quoted in section 1.2.1.1, p. 59). But in the context, the Luther quotation is intended to provide a commentary on the text from the Solida declaratio just quoted, and this text seems to be about the Exaltation merely. So I think we should be wary of taking the quotation as evidence that the authors wish to affirm bodily omnipresence during Christ’s earthly life. ⁹⁰ Epitome, VIII, §16 (808a.17–19; Dingel, 1272.16–18; Kolb and Wengert, 511, altered). ⁹¹ Epitome, VIII, §33 (811a.11–15; Dingel, 1276.25–7; Kolb and Wengert, 513). ⁹² Solida declaratio, VII, §101 (1007a.31–2, 34–6; Dingel, 1494.27–8, 29–30; Kolb and Wengert, 610), quoting Luther, Vom Abendmahl (WA, XXVI, 336.10–11, 12–13; LW, XXXVII, 223). ⁹³ Solida declaratio, VIII, §81 (1044a.15–19; Dingel, 1540.17–19; Kolb and Wengert, 631), quoting Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 332.20–2; LW, XXXVII, 218. ⁹⁴ Claiming that the two parts of the formula are in some kind of agreement on the issues of omnipresence is not the standard reading: traditionally, it is generally held that the Epitome affirms omnipresence against the omnivolipraesentia of the Solida declaratio: see e.g. Philip Schaff, Christ and Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 75—a judgement made without taking any account of a possible divergence between the earthly and exalted states of Christ’s body. I present the evidence for my view; you, my reader, can decide. Compared with the other differences between the two parts of the formula, which I have just been describing, this one seems relatively minor.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

209

Both parts of the formula quote the following text from Luther’s Vom Abendmahl: ‘Jesus Christ is true, essential, natural, complete God and man in one person, undivided and inseparable. . . . The right hand of God is everywhere’⁹⁵—a text which relates to the Incarnation as such, not the Exaltation. Andreae immediately adds a crucial gloss, in propria persona, not repeated in the Solida declaratio: Christ, really and truly placed at the right hand of God according to his human nature, rules presently and has in his hands and under his feet everything in heaven and on earth. No other man, no angel, but only Mary’s son, is so placed at the right hand of God, and on this basis he is able to do all these things.⁹⁶

The hermeneutical situation is ambiguous: although omnipresence seems in the text to be tied to Chalcedonian inseparability, as in the context in Luther, I have argued above that majestic attributes are according to the Epitome ‘hidden’ during Christ’s earthly life: they are not exercised, and so are not predicated. Perhaps omnipresence is an exception to the Epitome’s view that the relevant properties are not predicated non-episodically during Christ’s earthly life.⁹⁷ Overall, it is fair to say that the two parts of the formula are not formally contradictory: it is possible to find readings of the whole that are coherent. For example, it would be possible to understand the Epitome’s reference to the Son of Man as references not to the human nature, the same* person as the Son of God, but to something identical with the divine person, and thus reinterpret all the cases of Brenzian communicatio in line with Chalcedon. But the coherence of the two parts, thus achieved, would come at the expense of the internal coherence of the Epitome—something that would have to be dealt with by reinterpreting the obvious sense of the text in more obscure terms. As I have argued, if it is possible to assent to the whole, it is so only at the expense of the surface meaning of the text, and at the expense of the known views of its drafters.

6.3 Chemnitz, De Duabus Naturis in Christo (1578 Edition) The vast second edition of Chemnitz’s De duabus naturis in Christo (1578) is perhaps the outstanding Christological treatise from the Reformation. My account of it here can only deal with some of the most significant ideas it defends, and a complete treatment would require a much more than I can offer within the

⁹⁵ Epitome, VII, §12 (798a.27–31; Dingel, 1258.29–32; Kolb and Wengert, 505); Solida declaratio, VII, §§94–5 (1006a4–10; Dingel, 1492.26–9; Kolb and Wengert, 609, slightly altered), quoting Luther Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 326.29–32; LW, XXXVII, 214. ⁹⁶ Epitome, VII, §12 (798a.32–799a.6; Dingel, 1258.32–1260.1; Kolb and Wengert, 505, slightly altered). ⁹⁷ For a summary of the views, see Table 3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

210

 

confines of this book.⁹⁸ Significantly for our purposes, the text differs in some important respects from the first edition. The second edition accepts the necessary omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body, not merely omnivolipraesentia. It expressly rejects Brenz’s view that the union is constituted by the genus maiestaticum. Indeed, Chemnitz explicitly says that he is following Melanchthon on the supposital union. He also adopts Melanchthon’s CN-semantics for the genus idiomaticum. But he drops Andreae’s reductionism on the genus maiestaticum, and draws obvious inspiration from Brenz on the genus maiestaticum itself, identifying the metaphysical genus maiestaticum as the possession of divine powers, not merely divine activities, while denying, like the formula, that power-possession (as opposed to power-exercise) is sufficient for predication. Thus Chemnitz develops an account according to which the communicated divine attributes are numerically the same in God and in Christ’s human nature, and, probably building on a reading of Schegk, adumbrates a theory of how these attributes might belong to the human nature without obliterating it. (Eight years separates the two editions of Chemnitz’s treatise; and it is fair to say that a great deal happened, of Christological note, during those intervening years.)

6.3.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union In the second edition, Chemnitz follows closely Melanchthon’s Scotist account of the metaphysics of the hypostatic union and the genus idiomaticum. He again takes the supposital union to ground the hypostatic union: The hypostatic union, or the Incarnation, is a work of the entire Trinity by which the divine nature in the person of the Son alone assumed from the Virgin Mary a true human nature without transmutation and confusion. The two natures are inseparably connected and from them and in them is established one person in the incarnate Christ, in whom the assumed nature subsists and is sustained.⁹⁹

⁹⁸ For such a thing, see Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart. While providing a thorough treatment of Chemnitz’s overall Christology, Klinge does not go into such close detail on the communicatio idiomatum as I attempt to here, or on the differences between the two editions. Klinge provides an exhaustive bibliography. Space precludes consideration of the important work of Chemnitz’s close collaborator on the Solida declaratio, Nikolaus Selnecker (1532–92). His extensive treatise Repetitio doctrinae de idiomatum communicatione (Leipzig, 1581), while differing from Chemnitz’s 1578 De duabus in numerous small details, follows it in all essentials—for example, the supposital union (p. 27), the negation theory of subsistence (p. 27), CN-semantics (pp. 62–5), and the human nature’s possession but non-exercise of divine powers during Christ’s earthly life (pp. 47–8; see pp. 282–3 for the rejection of IBS and of factual omnipresence during Christ’s earthly life). It also contains a very nice discussion of the concrete/abstract distinction (see pp. 28–35). The text—which engages more explicitly with Reformed theologians (in particular Beza) than does Chemnitz’s—would certainly repay closer study. ⁹⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 4 (pp. 57–8; Preus, 72).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

211

Chemnitz talks about the person being established ‘from’ the natures. But we should not understand this to mean that the person is not identical with the second person of the Trinity. As Chemnitz puts it elsewhere, the ‘subject’ of the union is ‘the person of the Son’:¹⁰⁰ By this act of assumption the hypostasis of the Logos, which from eternity subsisted in the divine nature of the Son, became also the hypostasis of the assumed human nature, and now subsists in and consists of the two natures, inseparably united, with the divine assuming and the human assumed, and [the human nature] has its subsistence not in itself but in the person of the Logos in which it is sustained.¹⁰¹

As this passage makes clear, Chemnitz also accepts the view that the assumed nature is ‘devoid of its own personality’.¹⁰² Chemnitz again uses Melanchthon’s term ‘massa’ to talk about this individual nature,¹⁰³ and summarizes Melanchthon’s definition of person, including its broadly Scotist account of the way in which the assumed nature fails to be a person, much the same as in the first edition: ‘The term “person” as it is usually defined is an individual, intelligent, incommunicable substance which is not part of something else, is not sustained by something else, and does not depend on something else.’¹⁰⁴ (As in the first edition, Chemnitz later gives a quick rundown of the history of the term ‘person’, from Boethius through Richard of St Victor to later Scholastic thought.)¹⁰⁵ But note that Chemnitz has dropped the claim, made in the parallel discussion in the first edition, and discussed in section 5.3.1, pp. 180–1, that the divine person sustains both the nature and the idiomata. As we shall see, the second edition accepts not the LH-semantics of the earlier Chemnitz, but Melanchthon’s CN-semantics. As in the 1570 edition, Chemnitz briefly contextualizes his theory in terms of modes of divine presence in the universe, simply repeating what he said in the earlier edition (which I quoted above).¹⁰⁶ And, as in the earlier edition, this presence simply amounts to the hypostatic union itself. In relation to predications ‘in natural matter’, Chemnitz notes:

¹⁰⁰ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 4 (p. 54; Preus, 70). ¹⁰¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 4 (p. 56; Preus, 70–1, altered). ¹⁰² Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 4 (p. 56; Preus, 70). Note here a characteristic expression of the supposital-union theory in the claim that the human nature has a subsistence (though not its own). Preus’s translation of the displayed text just quoted, incidentally, misleadingly suggests not that the human nature ‘has its subsistence . . . in the person of the Word’ but that is ‘has its own subsistence . . . in the person of the Word’ (my italics). What Chemnitz means is that the human nature lacks its own subsistence, and has the subsistence of an extrinsic subsistent—the divine person—by hypostatically depending on that person. ¹⁰³ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (p. 9; Preus, 30); c. 4 (p. 56; Preus, 70); c. 5 (p. 61; Preus, 75). ¹⁰⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (pp. 7–8; Preus, 29). ¹⁰⁵ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 6 (pp. 81–2; Preus, 92). ¹⁰⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 5 (p. 62; Preus, 75).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

212

 

These predications pertain to the hypostatic union itself, from which results such a concrete communion between the united natures that God is man and man is God.¹⁰⁷ . . . The Scholastics have the rule that whatever things are united in one subject can be predicated of one another, and this is the highest degree of κοινωνίας [i.e. communion] between the united natures, from which arise these predications that the man is predicated of God and God is predicated of man. And besides there also results from the hypostatic union a κοινωνία, a communion or communication between the attributes of the natures.¹⁰⁸

Just as in the formula’s Epitome, there is an ambiguity here. On the face of it, there are four elements: (1) the ‘hypostatic union itself ’, ‘from which results’ (2) the communion of natures, ‘from which arise’ in turn (3) the predications ‘God is man’ and the like, and finally (4) the communion of attributes or properties. But the passage is not wholly clear. For example, it apparently treats the real communion of natures as explanatorily equivalent to the hypostatic union, and at one point it seems to identify the communion of natures simply as being ‘united in one subject’. So what explains the linguistic relations outlined in (3) and (4) is the simply the hypostatic union, and the communion of natures turns out to be identified as the hypostatic union. I deal with the question of the UC-ordering implied in the 1578 edition below. Given his acceptance of the supposital union as the ground of the hypostatic union, it is no surprise to find Chemnitz rejecting the view—associated with Brenz and his followers—that the hypostatic union might simply consist in the genus maiestaticum, or be grounded in this genus. The context is a discussion of Beza’s objection, repeated in the Wittenberg theologians’ Grundfest, that on Brenz’s view the whole Trinity will be incarnate: The opponents argue that if the personal union is defined as a communication of the essential divine attributes . . . it would follow that not only the person of the Son but also the entire Trinity became incarnate; for the essential attributes of the deity are common to the entire Trinity. However, we reply that in our churches we do not define the personal union as a communication, as we have shown by our description of the union in chapter 4, but rather we say that the communication grows out of and follows from the union.¹⁰⁹

The ‘description of the union in chapter 4’ is the definition set out in the quotation with which I started the current section—grounding the hypostatic union in the supposital union. The dialectical context is interesting. Chemnitz borrows Beza’s argument against Brenz’s constitutive view of the genus maiestaticum on the ¹⁰⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 5 (p. 70; Preus, 81). ¹⁰⁸ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 5 (p. 71, Preus, 82–3). ¹⁰⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 325; Preus, 304–5). See the discussion of Beza in Chapter 4 and of the Grundfest in the current chapter.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

213

grounds that such a view of the union would entail the incarnation of the whole Trinity. Clearly, one way of dealing with the position is to accept the consequence of the Brenzian theory, but deny that the theory is true. And this is what Chemnitz does here: ‘in our churches we do not define the personal union as a communication’. Given that the genus maiestaticum is, as Chemnitz maintains, a result of the union, Chemnitz has no trouble responding to Beza’s worry: the union has just one divine person as its relatum, and the consequent communication of the divine attributes to the human nature is not inconsistent with this. But Chemnitz clearly agrees that Brenz’s Christology is vulnerable to Beza’s objection, and rejects Brenz’s view. In contrast to his earlier efforts, Chemnitz here accepts CN-semantics for the genus idiomaticum, as just noted. On the basic claim that the genus idiomaticum pertains to predication of the person in concreto, Chemnitz quotes Melanchthon: In his Dialecticus, in the section on the differences, Philip uses the terminology of the scholastics when he says: ‘The properties of the one nature are attributed to the other concretely, which is so interpreted that there are predications in the concrete by which the person is indicated, such as, that the Son of God is man, and that God suffered’.¹¹⁰

(As in the 1570 edition of De duabus, Chemnitz uses the concrete/abstract distinction as a quick and easy way of being clear about the difference between person and nature—with person signified by concrete nouns and nature by abstract¹¹¹—though, as I shall show, he adds in some complexities for the genus maiestaticum.) As Chemnitz sees it, the relevant properties in the genus idiomaticum inhere in the natures (and are thus borne by them): ‘the substantial property of each nature essentially and formally inheres commonly and equally in each nature, otherwise there would be a commingling or an equating’.¹¹² The ‘substantial properties’ that Chemnitz refers to in the case of the human nature are properties individually or disjunctively necessary for being an instance of the relevant nature, distinct from the nature itself.¹¹³ And ‘inher[ing] commonly and equally in each nature’ evidently means that the divine attributes are borne by the divine nature, and human by the human.¹¹⁴ Chemnitz spells out the semantics simply by giving examples: ‘We say that God suffered, not that the divine Logos in his own nature endured the piercings of the nails, but that his body sustained that which was made proper for it. For God, who ¹¹⁰ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 14 (p. 195; Preus, 193); see too c. 13 (p. 170; Preus, 171). Chemnitz is summarizing Melanchthon, Erot. dial., l. 1 (CR 13, col. 525). ¹¹¹ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (p. 11; Preus, 32); c. 13 (pp. 174–5; Preus, 175). ¹¹² Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 12 (p. 161; Preus, 163). ¹¹³ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (pp. 14–15; Preus, 34–5). ¹¹⁴ It is, of course, highly unusual to claim that the divine attributes ‘inhere’ in the divine nature. I assume that Chemnitz wants to stress the parallels between the two cases. Perhaps we should not take the language too literally.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

214

 

could not suffer, was in the body which did suffer.’¹¹⁵ Here, what we mean when we say that God suffered is that the body suffered in which God was. Chemnitz makes similar points elsewhere: ‘We can truly say that God suffered, because that flesh suffered in which dwelt the whole fullness of the deity bodily’:¹¹⁶ again, what we mean when we say that God suffered is that the flesh in which God dwelt suffered. Both of the quotations just given amount to an acceptance of CN-semantics for non-trivial Christological predication. Chemnitz is aware that accepting CNsemantics does not mean—as Luther believed—that predications in the genus idiomaticum are ipso facto false: When I speak of the personal communication of the natures [i.e. the genus idiomaticum], I am saying that God certainly is not only verbally but really a man. Yet the divine nature is not really a human nature, for this would be a confusing of the natures. Again, when we say that the Son of God died, we are saying that he did not die merely verbally but actually. Death is attributed really not to the divine nature in itself but in reality to the person.¹¹⁷

Here, ‘really’ is to be understood in terms of realt, not realf, and simply means that the relevant predications are true—as for the Wittenberg theologians, and in contrast to what Chemnitz apparently holds in the first edition, and to what he and others expressly assert in the Solida declaratio of the Formula of Concord, as we saw in section 6.2, p. 202. Chemnitz contrasts these cases with those of ‘merely verbal’ predication: The communication is not called verbal but real in order that by this term we may distinguish it from a fictitious, pretended, imaginary, or putative communication. And in order that we may rid ourselves of other false ideas, we must add that the communion is not natural or essential but real.¹¹⁸

As Chemnitz sees it, ‘“verbal” and “real” are mutually exclusive’.¹¹⁹ For a predication to be merely verbal is for it to be false—‘something is attributed to something which is not actually present with it’. Again, ‘real’ should be understood as realt. For a predication to be true is for it to correspond to reality: ‘when we say that the Son of God died, we are saying that he [died] . . . actually’. But, given CN-semantics, one way to ‘die actually’ is to have a nature that dies (dying is ‘present with (adest)’¹²⁰ the person, presumably in the sense that the person has a nature that dies). Note, of

¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶ ¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁹ ¹²⁰

Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 16 (p. 215; Preus, 212). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 16 (p. 213; Preus, 211). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 12 (p. 158; Preus, 160). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 12 (pp. 157–8; Preus, 160, slightly altered). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 332; Preus, 310). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 12 (pp. 158; Preus, 160).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

215

course, that in Chemnitz’s sense of ‘verbal’, it is false that any of the Reformed views on the genus idiomaticum affirm merely verbal predication. The examples just discussed seem to be reasonably clear affirmations of CNsemantics. So it is no surprise to find Chemnitz quoting appropriate texts Cyril: ‘Cyril in his Epistola ad Nestorium says: “God is said to suffer, but not according to the nature of the Logos but because the body which was his own property suffered. For God, who could not suffer, was in the body which did suffer.” ’¹²¹ The Cyrilline quotation is, of course, CN. Chemnitz is aware that this view is found in late Medieval theology too: ‘We attribute birth to the person in the sense that he was born; but how and according to what a person is born, this we attribute to the nature, as the Scholastics put it.’¹²²

6.3.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum In section 0.2.2, p. 23, I mentioned Chemnitz’s distinction of supernatural gifts into created and inherent accidents, on the one hand, and the attributes and activities of the divine nature, on the other. In this section I shall talk about these two topics in turn, focusing on the second. On the first issue, Chemnitz notes that the relevant gifts ‘inhere in [the saints] formally, habitually, and subjectively, and in this way they differ in their nature and are distinct from the essential attributes of the divine nature’.¹²³ These gifts should be understood in line with standard Scholastic theories of grace and the theological virtues and gifts: created accidents inherent in the human person or nature (hence ‘formally . . . and subjectively’: they are accidental forms inhering in ¹²¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 15 (pp. 202–3; Preus, 201, slightly altered), quoting Ps.-Athanasius, De sancta Trinitate Dialogus IV, c. 4 (PG, 28, 1253D), and Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius, c. 5, quoted in the Introduction. ¹²² Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 16 (p. 212; Preus, 210). Chemnitz talks of nature-predication, along Scholastic lines, as a case of predication in abstracto: ‘Scripture teaches . . . in abstract terms, as they say in the Schools, with terms which indicate the assumed nature in union with the Logos, that the blood of Christ cleanses’ (Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 24 (p. 362; Preus, 334)). I commented in section 1.1.1.2, p. 54, on a text from Luther’s En. 53. cap. Is. in which Luther claims that predication in abstracto is ‘not to be done’. Chemnitz interprets this text as a warning not to interpret Christological predications in abstracto as though they gave information about the human nature independently of the union, or about what it is to be human—a worry generated specifically, for Chemnitz, by the genus maiestaticum. Luther, according to Chemnitz, is in effect perfectly happy to ascribe to the nature in abstracto predicates that can be, in virtue of the relevant nature-predication, ascribed to the person in concreto: on all this, see Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (p. 12; Preus, 32–3); see also c. 25 (p. 434; Preus, 389). In effect we have two kinds of predication in abstracto: a permissible one, in which the relevant predications are tracked by Christological predications in concreto; and an impermissible one, in which the relevant predications supposedly give information about what it is to be human, or about some independent endowment of Christ’s human nature. Luther, of course, does not connect his comments to the question of bodily omnipresence in this way: his concern is simply with the correct understanding of Christological predications given nominalist semantics. ¹²³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 20 (p. 254; Preus, 247); see too c. 20 (p. 255; Preus, 248); c. 21 (p. 265; Preus, 257).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

216

 

the nature as a subject). As in Scholastic theories, the gifts are placed in the Aristotelian category of quality, and count as habits or dispositions (i.e. the first species of the category of quality in Aristotle’s analysis)¹²⁴—just as the Scholastics categorized created virtues and gifts:¹²⁵ ‘He [viz. God] gives to them [viz. the saints] many gracious, spiritual, heavenly, and divine gifts which are usually called either qualities, habits, or virtues.’¹²⁶ They are the kind of gift that can be possessed by ‘the saints’, and not the kind of thing that is as such proper to Christ’s human nature. It is in virtue of gifts such as these that ‘believers are called partakers of the divine nature . . . as those who have communion with the divine nature (II Peter 1[:4])’.¹²⁷ In relation to the metaphysics of the genus maiestaticum properly so-called—the communication to the human nature of the divine attributes themselves— Chemnitz’s grounds for accepting the genus maiestaticum remain wholly Scriptural: he never offers any argument of the kind that Luther or Brenz offer, aiming to derive (e.g.) bodily omnipresence from the metaphysics of the hypostatic union. As Chemnitz puts it, ‘the ancient orthodox Church taught [the genus maiestaticum] on the basis of Scripture’.¹²⁸ Chemnitz devotes a lengthy chapter of the work (chapter 24) to Scriptural evidence,¹²⁹ and a further one, not quite as long, to Early Church teachings formulated on the basis of this evidence (chapter 25). In the second edition Chemnitz maintains that what are communicated to the human nature are the divine attributes themselves: ‘the attributes of the deity itself . . . are communicated to the humanity’;¹³⁰ the communicated attributes are ‘the essential, uncreated, and infinite attributes of the deity’;¹³¹ ‘the assumed nature in Christ . . . possesses . . . the properties (idiomata) or attributes (attributa) of the divine nature of the Logos’;¹³² ‘those things which Scripture predicates as given to Christ according to his human nature in this highest category are not created gifts, but are the attributes which belong to the deity itself ’.¹³³ A worry that arises straightaway—and which Chemnitz immediately tries to block—is of a broadly Schwenckfeldian kind: that this type of communication would result in the human nature’s simply being identical with the divine person: simply, in short, being divine. As Chemnitz puts it, ‘we must continue to safeguard this teaching

¹²⁴ See Aristotle, Cat., c. 8 (8b27–8). ¹²⁵ See e.g. Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 55, a. 1 (for virtues); I-II, q. 68, a. 3 (for gifts). ¹²⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 20 (p. 254; Preus, 247, altered). ¹²⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 20 (p. 254; Preus, 247). ¹²⁸ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 22 (p. 292; Preus, 279). ¹²⁹ See too Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 21 (pp. 267–70; Preus, 259–62), and c. 22 (pp. 287–8; Preus, 275), for further Scriptural evidence. ¹³⁰ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 19 (p. 253; Preus, 246). ¹³¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 20 (p. 254; Preus, 247). ¹³² Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 21 (p. 267; Preus, 259, altered). ¹³³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 21 (p. 267; Preus, 259).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

217

and in no case allow a commingling, conversion, or equalization (exaequationem) either of the natures or of the essential attributes of each nature in Christ’.¹³⁴ Just as in the first edition, Chemnitz rejects the view that either the divine attributes themselves or replica divine attributes could come to inhere in the human nature—each of which view is taken by him to result in the human nature’s simply being divine.¹³⁵ Common to both rejected views is that claim that the relevant attributes inhere in the human nature. Chemnitz proposes instead an account according to which the human nature possesses the attributes in a way that does not involve inherence, and in doing so moves beyond anything suggested in the first edition: There is and remains a great difference between the divine and the human nature. For the divine nature of the Logos, essentially or in essence, in, according to, and through itself, by nature, τῷ εἶναι [i.e. by its very being], is life-giving, omnipotent, and omniscient, indeed it is life and omnipotence itself. But the assumed human nature in Christ is in no way life-giving or omnipotent, essentially or in essence, in or through itself, by nature, formally, or τῷ εἶναι [i.e. by being], but only τῷ ἔχει [i.e. by having], that is, because it possesses the divine majesty and power of the Logos personally united to itself. And by virtue of the Logos which is wholly united with it, it makes all things alive, knows all, can do all, just as hot iron by virtue of its union with fire can glow and give heat.¹³⁶

So here the human nature possesses (some of) the attributes ‘by having’, just as in one of the readings of Schegk’s proposal examined in section 5.1, pp. 168–9: the attributes are possessed or borne without inherence.¹³⁷ The view Chemnitz here opposes involves a nature that possesses the attributes by being the attributes: being omnipotence, being omniscience, and so on; by being, in short, the divine nature. Chemnitz maintains that the assumed nature is omnipresent (on which, see later in this section), omnipotent,¹³⁸ omniscient,¹³⁹

¹³⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 22 (pp. 276–7; Preus, 267), slightly altered. ¹³⁵ For the first option, see Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 22 (pp. 279–80; Preus, 269–70); for the second, De duabus (1578), c. 22 (pp. 280–1; Preus, 270). ¹³⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 310; Preus, 293). ¹³⁷ The influence of Schegk here has been suggested by Klinge, who proposes that the view that the human nature has the divine attributes without being them derives from Brenz’s view of the genus maiestaticum, mediated through Schegk’s modification outlined at the end of the previous chapter: see Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart, 201–2. It seems to me highly likely that Schegk’s view suggested the terminology (‘being’ vs. ‘having’) to Chemnitz, and as I have suggested Schegk performed some useful groundwork in separating bearing from inherence. But for all that the resemblance runs no more than surface deep. According to Schegk, as we have seen, the humanity is omnipresent since it in some sense bears a nature—the divine nature—that has the property omnipresence. Chemnitz’s account is very different: the humanity is omnipresent since it bears the property omnipresence. ¹³⁸ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 310; Preus, 293), quoted below. ¹³⁹ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 310; Preus, 293), quoted below.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

218

 

life-giving¹⁴⁰ and worthy of worship,¹⁴¹ and that it is an ‘instrument’ of the divinity.¹⁴² We should construe this in line with Brenz’s claims about the genus maiestaticum: what is possessed are divine powers, not merely activities—on which, see the passage from Chemnitz quoted in section 0.2.2, pp. 23–4, which is perfectly explicit on the matter. Chemnitz comes to maintain that the human nature itself exercises this divine power, and thus comes to reject the Andreaean reductionism that characterized his view in the first edition, according to which the causal order involves nothing more than the divine person using the human nature, rather than the human nature using a divine power. We can see more clearly the difference between the two editions if we look at what Chemnitz says about the fire–iron analogy. In the first edition, as we saw in section 5.3.2, pp. 185–6, the fire does the heating, and uses the iron as its instrument. In the second edition, in addition to this relation, Chemnitz holds that the iron itself uses the heat’s power (and thus, by analogy, that the human nature uses divine power), as in the final sentence of the displayed text just quoted: The fire is so united with the iron that it manifests and exercises its own power, force, and qualities, not by itself or separately but in, with, and through the iron which is united with it. And the heated iron so uses the power of the fire united with it that it glows and gives heat and light.¹⁴³

Here, then, we have something like the human nature’s power-exercise defended by Brenz and (probably) Wigand, in contrast to Andreae’s reductionist account according to which the genus maiestaticum consists not in the human nature’s use of divine powers but the divine person’s use of the human nature. And note too a different account of instrumentality from that presupposed in the more Andreaean 1570 edition: in the later edition, part of what it is to be an instrument is to exercise the causal power of the principal agent, and to do so by being the subject of that power, not the object. What lies behind this shift, I suspect, is Chemnitz’s coming to see how divine powers—as opposed merely to activities— could be possessed by the human nature without inherence. Once we allow that the human nature possesses certain powers, it is relatively easy to suppose that the nature itself, rather than merely the divine person, exercises those powers. In this sense, then, Chemnitz’s appropriation of Schegk’s insights on the question ¹⁴⁰ Chemnitz makes the point frequently: see e.g. De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 330; Preus 308). ¹⁴¹ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 29 passim. ¹⁴² Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (pp. 306, 314–15; Preus, 290–1, 296–7). Chemnitz reports a variety of Patristic terminological options for discussing this communication, foremost among which is talk of the human nature being ‘deified (θεοθεῖσα)’ (Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 26 (p. 436; Preus, 396)). He also mentions (among many other terminological options) ‘communion (κοινωνία)’ (Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 26 (p. 439; Preus, 397))—which thus is ambiguous between the genus maiestaticum (in the case of Christ) and (as just seen) non-divine SG-possession (in the case of Christians). ¹⁴³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (pp. 306–7; Preus, 291).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

219

of non-inherent power-possession allows him to adopt Brenz’s view, against Andreae, on the divine activity of the human nature. Another point of sharp contrast with the first edition emerges in a related discussion. In the first edition, Chemnitz holds that the human nature’s divine power-possession is merely its being hypostatically united to a nature that possesses such powers. In the second edition, it is what it seems to be: namely, the human nature’s being the subject of—bearing, or having in Schegk’s sense—the relevant divine powers. Thus, at one point in the second edition, for example, when talking about the failure of these powers to manifest themselves, Chemnitz claims that ‘the presence and possession (praesentia et possessio) of a certain power must not be denied merely if its use and manifestation are suspended for a time’.¹⁴⁴ Here Chemnitz borrows and silently alters a passage from the first edition that I quoted in section 5.3.2, p. 184. In the first edition, ‘presence and possession’ amounts to the divine nature’s being hypostatically united to the human nature. In the second, it amounts to the human nature’s having a divine power that it fails to use. Thus, Chemnitz, instead of contrasting presence and use in terms, respectively, of the hypostatic union and divine activity in the nature, contrasts them in terms of having a power and exercising that power. Again, Chemnitz illustrates what he means by using the fire–iron analogy: We can understand this from a simile. If in the case of iron which is fully heated in all parts God should withhold for a time the demonstration and action of the power to give light and heat, so that to those who saw and felt it the iron would appear cold, black, and dingy, and if later on, when God so willed, it should begin to exercise its normal power of giving heat and light, it would certainly not be correct to say that it had received this power for the first time from outside or from elsewhere if it previously did not have it in itself.¹⁴⁵

Here, again, it is the iron’s fiery power that is exercised; and it is exercised by the iron, not the fire. The analogy would suggest that in the hypostatic union what is exercised is the human nature’s divine power—as opposed, say, to the divine person exercising his power through the human nature, as in Andreae’s reductionist view). And the contrast is between the iron’s (and thus the human nature’s) power-possession and power-exercise, and not between the mere presence of the divine person to the human nature and divine activity in that nature, as in the first edition. In line with this (and like Wigand and the Württemberg theologians), Chemnitz divides the divine attributes into two classes: those comprising the ‘divine majesty and power of the Logos’¹⁴⁶—those ‘by which the divine essence, by a ¹⁴⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 33 (p. 555; Preus, 491). ¹⁴⁵ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 33 (pp. 554–5; Preus, 491). ¹⁴⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 309; Preus, 293).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

220

 

certain ἐνέργειᾳ [i.e. power], as it were goes out of itself to creatures’—and those that do not perform this function.¹⁴⁷ In the first group he lists ‘justice’, ‘goodness’, ‘power, majesty, glory, wisdom and life’;¹⁴⁸ in the second (referring to a text in John of Damascus) ‘eternity, immensity, infinity, and the spiritual qualities of the essence’.¹⁴⁹ All of these attributes are communicated, but in different ways: each of the former ‘carries on its work through the assumed nature’, and they ‘manifest their ἐνεγείας [i.e. activities] in and through’ the assumed nature.¹⁵⁰ The latter do not. So the communication of the former amounts to their being borne by the human nature; the communication of the latter—and of the deity too—amounts simply to the hypostatic union: In this relationship or frame of reference there is no partitioning or separating of the divine attributes among themselves; but we do speak of a distinction in regard to things outside the Godhead, that is, in regard to creatures. Yet because the Logos communicated by the personal union the whole fullness of his deity personally to the assumed nature, he certainly left nothing uncommunicated; for he communicated himself personally, as the total and entire fullness of the Godhead to the assumed nature. Furthermore, such characteristic or attributes as eternity and immeasurability are joined to the other divine attributes by an indissoluble connection. For the divine power which carries on its work through the assumed nature is an eternal, immeasurable, infinite, and divine power.¹⁵¹

(Here Chemnitz uses Andreae’s language, but, since as we have seen he rejects Andreaean reductionism, he apparently does not take the language to imply that view.) But while Chemnitz follows Wigand and Brenz in his distinction of the divine attributes, he does not follow them in holding that the distinction is strictly speaking between communicable and incommunicable attributes.¹⁵² Rather, he bases the distinction on different modes of communication, since he holds that all the attributes are communicated, albeit in different ways. Some attributes (the majestic and operative ones) are communicated and possessed or had; others are communicated (i.e. hypostatically united to the human nature) but not possessed.¹⁵³ The discussion allows us to provide an account of Chemnitz’s 1578 theory of UC-ordering, as an explanatory three-stage view, from supposital union ¹⁴⁷ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (pp. 328–9; Preus, 307, altered). ¹⁴⁸ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 329; Preus, 307). ¹⁴⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 329; Preus, 307). John mentions John of Damascus, Exp. fid. c. 59 (which he calls the ‘libellus de duabus operationibus’). But John does not there make the distinction Chemnitz has in mind. John makes a related distinction—between God and the things ‘around the essence’—including activities, at Exp. fid. c. 4, ll. 26–7, 33–6 (p. 13; Chase, 171–2). But this distinction does not seem to be quite the one that Chemnitz has in mind, as I will point out shortly. ¹⁵⁰ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 330; Preus, 308). ¹⁵¹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (pp. 329–30; Preus, 308). ¹⁵² See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 329; Preus, 308). ¹⁵³ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 330; Preus, 308)—the last displayed quotation.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

221

to metaphysical genus maiestaticum: (supposital union → hypostatic union → (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticum)).¹⁵⁴ Chemnitz holds that the contrast between power-exercise and mere powerpossession is required to make sense of the biblical data relevant to Christ’s earthly ministry: The humiliation mentioned in Philippians 2, therefore, does not indicate a deprivation, removal, robing, exclusion, taking away, degradation, putting away, lack, absence, loss, barrenness, or emptiness of the fullness of the Godhead which dwelt in Christ corporeally from the very moment of the conception. But it has to do with the use or exercise (usum seu usurpationem) of it, that is, the brilliance of Christ did not always shine out in the time of his humiliation, since it was covered (tecta) with infirmity, and it did not always assert itself plainly and clearly because of the humiliation. For Christ drew in and restrained to some degree the divine power and presence which dwelt bodily in him.¹⁵⁵

Chemnitz here claims to be accepting a kryptic account of the humiliation. So he assesses the krypsis–kenosis distinction in terms of the possession of a power without exercise or predication. The distinction of communicated attributes into two groups allows Chemnitz to add certain refinements to his response to an objection that his position is indiscernible from Schwenckfeld’s. According to the objection, the deity is communicated to the human nature, such that the human nature ‘has therefore become the divine essence’, or ‘an eternal, infinite, or spiritual substance’.¹⁵⁶ Chemnitz agrees that the divine essence is communicated (in the sense of being hypostatically united to the human nature), but he holds that a necessary condition for predication is that the relevant attributes relate to power and powerpossession. So the essence and non-energetic attributes cannot be predicated of the human nature. Hence, appealing to the same text in John of Damascus, the Son’s communication to the human nature does not make the nature ‘a [partaker] of his [divine] nature, but of his ἐνεγείας [i.e. activities]’: By the personal communication of the other attributes the humanity of Christ is not made omnipotent, omniscient, or vivifying of itself or in itself, essentially, or in essence, by some property or condition of its own nature, but because the assumed humanity possesses personally, united to itself, the attributes of the divine Logos in such a way that the attributes show their activities in and through the humanity.¹⁵⁷

¹⁵⁴ ¹⁵⁵ ¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵⁷

For a summary, see Table 1. Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 33 (p. 551; Preus, 488, slightly altered). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 327; Preus, 306). Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 23 (p. 330; Preus, 308–9).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

222

 

The ‘other attributes’ are those that manifest their activity, and it is these that are predicated of the assumed nature. Hence deity (for example) is communicated (i.e. hypostatically united) but not predicated, and it is not the case that the human nature ‘has become the divine essence’, or ‘an eternal, infinite, or spiritual substance’. And note that, as I have already shown, predication tracks power-exercise, not power-possession: the nature’s possession of a divine power is not sufficient for the predication of the corresponding divine attribute.¹⁵⁸ There is a further significant divergence between the two editions, too. In the first edition, Chemnitz, following Hesshus, refuses to allow that Christ’s exalted body is omnipresent. As Klinge has noted, the situation is different in the second edition. He cites two texts. Here is the more striking: The humanity in and with the Logos rules all things, not in the sense of being absent, far away, or removed by an immense interval of space, or through some vicarious work and administration, such as kings are accustomed to exercise when their power is extended widely through many provinces. But just as the human nature subsists in the Logos and insofar as it personally adheres to the Logos, it also has all things before it in the Logos and in being present it rules over all things in the Logos.¹⁵⁹

Here omnipresence is inferred from omnipotence: ‘the humanity . . . has all things before it’—i.e. immediately before it, as the passage makes clear—and ‘in being present . . . rules over all things’. I assume that Chemnitz is here adapting his view to that espoused in the Solida declaratio of the previous year.¹⁶⁰ The divergence from Hesshus on this issue, incidentally, was made very clear in Chemnitz’s express adoption of omnipresence, against Hesshus, at the 1583 Colloquy of Quedlinburg.¹⁶¹ But it should be said that the overall metaphysical structure of Chemnitz’s Christology remains firmly in the line of Hesshus, not the Württemberg theologians, as should be obvious from what I have reported thus far. Chemnitz holds that, even given the omnipresence of Christ’s exalted body, it is possible that Christ’s body be present in other ways too: ‘The Logos can be present with his human nature wherever, whenever, and however he wills, not only in some place with his essential attributes but also according to and on account of the secret and ineffable personal union of the humanity with the deity.’¹⁶² Among ¹⁵⁸ For a summary, see Table 2. ¹⁵⁹ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (pp. 521–2; Preus, 463, slightly altered). This passage is quoted by Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart, 263. He also discusses a further passage that seems to me less decisive: see Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (p. 521; Preus, 462). ¹⁶⁰ This text is discussed in Lindholm, Jerome Zanchi, 166–7, to much the same effect. ¹⁶¹ On this, see Klinge, Verheißene Gegenwart, 264–6; also Thilo Krüger, Empfangene Allmacht, 223–53. For the colloquy as a whole, see Inge Mager, Die Konkordienformel im Fürstentum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Studien zur Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens, 33 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 433–70; also Dingel, Concordia controversa, 425–48. For a summary of the various views, see Table 3. ¹⁶² Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (p. 499; Preus, 446).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

223

these other ways are circumscriptive presence, something which, as a matter of contingent fact, Chemnitz believes is manifested by Christ’s body in all of its conditions.¹⁶³ Elsewhere Chemnitz makes it clear that even in Christ’s glorified post-Ascension existence his body ‘is and remains circumscribed by reason of its finite essence and the quality of its nature, having and retaining the finite proportions (συμμετρία) of its members’.¹⁶⁴ So this kind of exalted presence can itself be local.¹⁶⁵ But, just as in Luther, it need not be; Christ can be present nonlocally in the Eucharist, for example.¹⁶⁶ The distinction of the attributes into two groups raises in an acute way the Augustinian problem of divine simplicity. We might expect Chemnitz to claim that there are two classes of divine attribute: those that are somehow identical with the divine essence (and thus communicated by mere hypostatic union, without possession), and those that are not—and any attribute that can be possessed ought to fall in this second group (for example, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence). But this is not at all Chemnitz’s official position on divine simplicity: In the divine nature all attributes are essential, which are not something distinct or different from the essence of God itself. For if the divine οὐσία [i.e. essence] were perfected by something different from itself, that is, if it were made better, more blessed, or more perfect, it would not then be a completely simple essence, nor would it be the highest and most perfect good. And so the divine essence is powerful and wise, not by power and wisdom that are different from the essence, like a quality; but the divine essence is omnipotence itself, wisdom itself, goodness itself.¹⁶⁷

And Chemnitz immediately mentions the difference between an essence and ‘τὰ περὶ τὴν φύσιν [i.e. the things around the essence]’—a well-known Patristic distinction usually related to the divine essence and attributes or activities—and restricts it to the created realm.¹⁶⁸ According to this passage, then, omnipotence ¹⁶³ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (p. 472; Preus, 426–7). As far as I know, Chemnitz does not use Luther’s medieval terminology (‘definitive presence’, ‘repletive presence’), and prefers to speak merely in terms of the absence of circumscription. ¹⁶⁴ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (p. 496; Preus, 444). ¹⁶⁵ See Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (pp. 477–9; Preus, 430–1). ¹⁶⁶ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 30 (p. 486; Preus, 436–7). ¹⁶⁷ Chemntiz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (p. 14; Preus, 34). ¹⁶⁸ Chemnitz, De duabus (1578), c. 1 (p. 15; Preus, 34). The distinction between the divine essence and things around the essence goes back to Basil of Caesarea, and it would be an interesting study—not one I shall undertake here—to trace the history of later Lutheran interpretation of the relevant Greek texts. One Lutheran thinker writing in the penultimate decade of the sixteenth century who understood the need to depart from the Augustinian consensus if the genus maiestaticum is to be maintained, and who expressly appealed to the distinction between essence and attribute that he finds in Basil, is Hesshus. Confronting the Augustinian objection that the identity of essence and attributes in God entails that, if an attribute is communicated, the essence will be too (a conclusion that Hesshus wants to reject since, as the objector sees, it would mean that ‘the flesh of Christ is the divinity’) (Hesshus, De duabus, fols. O3v–O4r), Hesshus responds that there is indeed a distinction, not understood by us, between the essence and some of the properties (idiomata) of the deity, and that we must posit it on the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

224

 

and wisdom (and, I assume, omniscience) are simply identified as the divine essence, and it is not at all clear how they might be communicated (in the sense of possessed) without the divine essence’s being so communicated.¹⁶⁹ In the 1578 edition, as we have just seen, Chemnitz adopts Schegk’s language of ‘having’ (construed as bearing) to talk about the relation between the divine powers and the human nature. And he is explicit that predication tracks powerexercise. So on the semantics of the linguistic genus maiestaticum, then, he here accepts as far as I can tell the following variant of his earlier view: CGM₂-semantics: ‘Christ’s human nature h (or Christ according to h) is φd’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness only if (h bears Φd-ness, and p bears h). In effect, Schegk’s language provides Chemnitz with a way of construing the penultimate conjunct here, and gives him what Wigand lacked: a way to conceptualize the possession-without-inherence of a divine power. And the definition shows him following Brenz, not Andreae, on the question of power-exercise.

6.4 A ‘Second Martin’? Interpreters disagree on the identity of the authentic inheritor of Luther’s Christology: Brenz or Chemnitz. Brenz has had more supporters, but since Mahlmann’s suggestion that Chemnitz is more deserving of the title, there has been some debate on the issue. Determining the answer to a question of this nature, of course, depends on the correct interpretation of Luther’s theology. As I have presented it,

grounds of Scriptural revelation about the genus maiestaticum. Hesshus appeals (plausibly) to Basil of Caesarea, Contra Eunomium I, for the distinction between essence and attributes (Hesshus, De duabus, fol. O5r), and notes that failing to make any such distinction was according to Basil the error of his opponent, Eunomius (d. 394), who denied the divinity of the Son of God (see Hesshus, De duabus, fol. O6r). (According to Eunomius, God’s essence is to be unbegotten, from which it follows that the Son of God, as something agreed by all sides to be begotten, cannot be divine. Basil claims that ‘being unbegotten’ is not the divine essence, and that in general we must distinguish between the divine essence and things attributed to God: see Basil, Contra Eunomium I, c. 8, ll. 22–8 (ed. Bernard Sesboüé and others, Sources chrétiennes, 299 (Paris: Cerf, 1982), 194).) Hesshus concludes: ‘It should not be asserted without qualification that the essential properties (idiomata essentialia) are the very essence of God, and that there is absolutely no distinction’ (Hesshus, De duabus, fol. O6r). ¹⁶⁹ In their defence of the Formula of Concord, Chemnitz, Timotheus Kirchner (1533–87), and Selnecker, show an awareness of the Augustinian problem (it had been highlighted by their Calvinist opponents), and simply claim that they ascribe to the human nature merely what is endorsed in Scripture: ‘We do not fear for this reason that we are dividing the divine attributes; for the Son of God who has revealed the doctrine of the communication of divine omnipotence, quickening power, and other attributes, undoubtedly well knows how this communication can occur without any separation of the attributes’ (Apologia Oder Verantwortung des Christlichen Concordien Buchs (Dresden, 1584), fol. 81r), translation from Bjarne Wollan Teigen, The Lord’s Supper in the Theology of Martin Chemnitz (Brewster, MA: Trinity Lutheran Press, 1986), 35.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

   

225

Luther’s theology has three distinctive features in relation to earlier Scholastic Christologies: (1) LH-semantics, (2) the extension of SG-possession to necessary bodily omnipresence, specifically (3) on the basis of the IBS principle—a principle that requires necessary, not just factual or counterfactual, omnipresence. Brenz accepts the second and third of these features, and something akin to the first; Chemnitz only the second, and that only for the Exaltation. Chemnitz and Brenz both agree—against Luther—that SG-possession should be extended to include the genus maiestaticum in the technical sense: that is to say, the possession (without inherence) of one or more of the divine attributes themselves. They thus agree on what is most distinctive of the later Lutheran tradition, originating from Brenz. All three accept omnipresence, but whereas Brenz and Chemnitz apparently hold that it is a divine attribute, Luther expressly denies this. Luther and Chemnitz accept the supposital union, whereas Brenz expressly and vigorously rejects it in favour of an application of Brenzian communicatio. But Brenzian communicatio—unlike Luther’s LH-semantics and Chemnitz’s CN-semantics— does not get the correct truth values for all non-trivial Christological predications. In this sense, Brenz is much further removed from Luther and Chemnitz than either of these latter two are from each other: he fails the standard of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, not on the grounds that the genus maiestaticum involves mixing the natures (if this constituted the failure, all the ‘majestic’ Lutherans would fail, not just the Brenzians), but on the grounds that the conjunction of BH-semantics and BGM-semantics, given the restrictions supposed in BMP, does not get the right truth-values for every Christological predication. Finally, as he makes clear, Chemnitz derives his CN-semantics from Melanchthon. Still, BH-semantics is much closer to LH-semantics than Chemnitz’s CN-semantics is, because both of the former involve the divine person’s bearing his human accidents. In short, our three theologians are so very different from each other, and their thoughts overlap in such complex and divergent ways, that asking which resemble each other more seems tantamount to meaningless. We can, I think, do little more than offer the rather anodyne observation that they are more similar to each other than they are to their Reformed and Wittenberg opponents, who reject both IBS and the genus maiestaticum. And as for the second Martin, neither Brenz nor Andreae will fit the bill (and not just by reason of nomenclature). Brenzian communicatio results (unintentionally) in a non-Chalcedonian Christology, whereas on my reading both Luther and Chemnitz affirm Christological views that are as far as I can tell fully compatible with Chalcedon, at least if granted the various anthropological assumptions made by these two theologians. (That is not to say that Chalcedon requires SG-possession or the genus maiestaticum; my claim here is only about what is consistent with Chalcedon.)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

7 Andreae and Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard

The Colloquy of Montbéliard (1586) represented the last major attempt at Christological rapprochement between the Lutheran and Reformed theologians.¹ That Andreae and Beza should have been the principal protagonists is unfortunate if nevertheless comprehensible. Andreae was Chancellor of the University of Tübingen, and the colloquy was convened (for locally practical and pastoral reasons) by the nephew of the Duke of Württemberg in whose domain both Montbéliard and Tübingen lay; Andreae was also the main political force, if perhaps not the main theological one, among the Lutheran theologians in the various manoeuvres leading up to the Formula of Concord. Beza was, as noted above, Calvin’s successor as leader of the Church in Geneva. But it is perhaps regrettable that the colloquy should have pitted such old enemies against each other, and all the more so since Andreae represented not the best of Lutheran majestic Christology but what we might think of as Brenz’s deviant nonChalcedonian Christology. Followers of Chemnitz would have been, from theological and Christological perspectives, better equipped to act as representatives of a Christological tradition that includes the genus maiestaticum, since their Christological distance from the Reformed party is in other respects less vast. And in any case, Andreae was not very nimble in debate, and his lack of dialectical skill placed the Lutherans at an overall intellectual disadvantage. Persistently, he was intellectually outmanoeuvred by the far more perceptive Beza—apparently without noticing.² Of course, winning an argument and being successful in ¹ For a full account of the colloquy, in both its political and theological dimensions, see Jill Raitt, The Colloquy of Montbéliard: Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). ² Raitt comments in a footnote, citing Robert Kolb, ‘According to Andreae’s biographers, he was actually not very skilled in philosophy, while Beza had the opposite reputation. See Kolb, Andreae and the Formula of Concord[: Six Sermons on the Way to Lutheran Unity (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1977)], 10: “His [Andreae’s] antagonists later called him a theological lightweight because he had had so little formal theological training.” . . . Beza was a skilled Aristotelian and as such at the origin of Reformed scholasticism’: Raitt, 103, n. 44. The contrast seems highly plausible to me. But note that my argument in this volume should have made it clear, at least in passing, that almost all of the theologians discussed here show considerable skill and expertise in Scholastic theology, and the distinction between first- and secondgeneration reformers in this respect is falsely drawn. If anything, Luther, in particular, was more, not less, proficient in Scholastic philosophy than his successors, and did not hesitate to use it when required for his argument, as we have seen. The only part of Sparn’s estimable monograph on early seventeenth-century

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

227

ecumenical rapprochement are very different things; it is hard to imagine that any pair of theologians, howsoever intelligent and sensitive, could have succeeded in the overwhelming task that was set for Andreae and Beza. There are three relevant texts. The first is the proceedings of the colloquy itself, published by Andreae in 1587. Andreae annotated the text with various comments favourable to his own view and hostile to Beza’s, and in the same year Beza published a Responsio, largely taking issue with Andreae’s annotations, though occasionally commenting on the proceedings themselves. In 1588 Andreae published an Epitome of the issues raised in the colloquy. As we shall see, the Epitome adds a few useful elements to Andreae’s view. But what seems to me most notable about this last text is Andreae’s utter failure to address what look like fatal objections to the Chalcedonian orthodoxy of his position, set out very clearly in Beza’s Responsio.

7.1 Andreae’s Later Christology 7.1.1 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Hypostatic Union and the Genus Idiomaticum Andreae’s contribution to the discussion at Montbéliard gives the fullest account of both the metaphysics and the semantics of the hypostatic union as construed along broadly Brenzian lines. In so doing, it exposes very clearly the gaps in this understanding of the union, something that Beza exploits in his critique of Andreae’s position. The following passage is crucial, and represents perhaps the clearest statement of a Brenz-style understanding of the hypostatic union in the literature that I have examined: In this expression, ‘This man is God’, the term ‘man’ means a true man . . . which consists of a body and a rational soul, namely, Jesus the Son of Mary of the seed of David; and the second term ‘God’ means the true and eternal, essential Son of God . . . ; and the third, the word ‘is’, retains its own proper meaning, by which something that is expressed is said actually to be and exist.³

The first point to note is that ‘man’ signifies something that consists merely of ‘a body and rational soul’—that is to say, in the Christological context, the Lutheranism that one might reasonably criticize is its title: ‘Wiederkehr der Metaphysik’; perhaps ‘Wiederkehr der Systematik’ would be a better characterization of the contrast between sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and the latter more Scholastic in no deeper sense than that. ³ Andreae, Acta Colloquii Monte Beligardensis (Tübingen, 1587), 347; ET Lutheranism vs. Calvinism: The Classic Debate at the Colloquy of Montbéliard, trans. Clinton J. Armstrong, ed. Jeffrey Mallinson (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 2017), 428. In what follows I silently alter the translation’s punctuation—which more or less follows that in the original Latin—to conform more to modern norms. I explicitly indicate greater divergences from the translation.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

228

 

humanity or human nature, identified as ‘Jesus the Son of Mary’—in sharp contrast to Luther’s view. ‘This man’ is not the divine person but the human nature. As Andreae sees the matter, specifying ‘this man’ in the relevant expression is sufficient to ensure that ‘man’ refers to a particular thing: The term ‘man’ is a universal term, which is attributed to all men. For if it is said that man is a rational animal, is a creature of God, is mortal, and countless similar things which pertain to human nature, there is no need to add the universal marker ‘every’, since the term ‘man’ does not signify an individual thing but a species, which contains all individual things of the same species under it. It is for this reason that in order for the proposition ‘Man is God’ to be true, you need to add the pronoun ‘this’, or the proper name of Christ: ‘This man is God’, or ‘the man Christ Jesus Son of Mary is God’. Otherwise it is simply not true. From this it is clear to everyone that if the term ‘man’ were to be put forward without determination, it would not be concrete but abstract. But if a determination should be added: ‘this man’, ‘the man Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Mary’, then this is indeed concrete, and signifies a man of this sort, who is personally united with God, and on this account is and is said to be God.⁴

The idea here is that there is a distinction between particular and universal: the universal, ‘which contains all individual things of the same species under it’, can be signified by linguistically concrete nouns (e.g. ‘man’); to signify the particular, the noun requires a ‘determination’—a demonstrative adjective sufficient to tie the noun to a particular. For example, ‘this man’ in ‘This man is God’ signifies a particular human nature. In the case that a linguistically concrete noun (e.g. ‘man’) signifies the universal, we classify the noun as Christologically abstract, such that signifying a universal is a sufficient but not necessary condition for being abstract. (I return to Andreae’s puzzling treatment of the concrete/abstract distinction in a moment; what he says about the signification of linguistically concrete nouns is not exhausted by this discussion, and he says a number of things about the signification of linguistically abstract nouns (e.g. ‘humanity’) that we need to understand too.)⁵ So Andreae reads the expression ‘this man is God’ as asserting a relationship between two particular things signified by concrete nouns—‘this man’ and ‘God’. What sort of relationship? Clearly, the treatment of ‘is’ in the analysis of the semantics of ‘This man is God’ is not quite right (‘ “is” retains its own proper meaning, by which something that is expressed is said actually to be and exist’). Contrary to what he claims here, it is not the existential sense that Andreae needs. ⁴ Andreae, Acta, 227; Armstrong and Mallinson, 274; see also Acta, 272; Armstrong and Mallinson, 324. ⁵ The puzzle that arises in the discussion thus far—one that Andreae seems unaware of—is that his account seems to leave no place for anything other than de re reference: it does not allow for indefinite singular reference such as ‘a human being’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

229

But presumably he means us to understand that it is not the predicative sense that he wants either, but some other kind of ‘is’, presumably one that expresses some form of sameness. The predication is, as Andreae puts it, neither ‘regular’ (i.e. predicative) nor ‘metaphorical’, but ‘a third predication, which is called unusual (inusitata)’⁶—borrowing a distinction from Melanchthon that I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 2. I assume that, as in Melanchthon, ‘regular’ predications are those covered under Porphyry’s predicables. At one point Andreae and Beza discuss the place of ‘man/humanity’, as a species term, in Porphyry’s scheme, and they both seem to assume that the Porphyrian analysis is uncontroversial for their purposes.⁷ Thus the relata are particular objects: the Son of God, the Son of Man, and what ‘This man is God’ expresses is that these two concrete objects are in some sense the same. But despite being the same, the Son of God and the Son of Man are not identical, as we see from Andreae’s exegesis of ‘The Word became flesh’ (Jn 1:14). To understand what he says, we have to look a little more closely at Andreae’s rather idiosyncratic account of the concrete/abstract distinction. Basically, Andreae holds that Christological terms signifying the various items within the union are concrete, and Christological terms signifying the various items outside or separate from the union are abstract. So in ‘the Word is man’, for example, or ‘this man is God’, the various terms are concrete, as we have seen. But in ‘The Word became flesh’, or ‘flesh became God’—equivalent to ‘The Word became man’ and ‘man became God’—the terms are abstract, signifying the various items antecedent to the union:⁸ the only difference between the cases of ‘God’ and ‘man’ being that the Word preexisted the union, whereas ‘man’ signifies something ‘that did not exist before it was assumed’.⁹ The idea is that each abstract noun (in this sense) signifies something that is identical (I assume) with the significate of the cognate concrete noun after the union (so the Word before the union is identical to the Word after the union, even though ‘Word’ has changed from an abstract to a concrete noun in this specialized sense; and man ‘before’ the union is identical to this man ‘after’ the union, even though ‘man’ has changed from an abstract to a concrete noun in this specialized sense).¹⁰ But the significates of ‘Word’ and ‘(the) man’ are not identical, since the one signifies something that assumes, and becomes man, and the other signifies something that is assumed, and becomes God. So the Son of God and the Son of Man have different histories, and are thus

⁶ Andreae, Acta, 368; Armstrong and Mallinson, 429. ⁷ Andreae, Acta, 225; Armstrong and Mallinson, 272. ⁸ Andreae makes these various points at Acta, 229; Armstrong and Mallinson, 276, and Acta, 360–1; Armstrong and Mallinson, 421–2. ⁹ Andreae, Acta, 360; Armstrong and Mallinson, 422. ¹⁰ ‘Man’ and ‘humanity’ are not substitutable salva veritate in all contexts. Given the semantics just outlined, ‘the Word is humanity’ is false even though ‘the Word is (this) man’ is true. I take it that Andreae ought not object to ‘the Word becomes humanity’, but he does not discuss the case.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

230

 

not identical. So Andreae accepts BS-semantics for predications ‘in natural matter’: the Son of God and the Son of Man are the same* person.¹¹ As thus described Andreae’s claims about the concrete/abstract distinction seem strangely under-motivated, and at first glance the whole discussion has the appearance of mere eristic. After all, Brenz-style Christologies, as noted earlier, have no place for the concrete/abstract distinction as generally understood. Now, the context is dialectical, an attempt to respond to Beza’s view, which I shall discuss in section 7.2.2 of this chapter, that Andreae’s acceptance of the genus maiestaticum is simply a confusion of concrete (e.g. ‘(the) man is omnipotent’) and abstract (e.g. ‘(the) humanity is omnipotent’)—the former of which, of course, but not the latter, Beza accepts. By drawing the concrete/abstract distinction in the way that he does, Andreae attempts to show that he is not guilty of the misunderstanding that Beza ascribes to him. Thus he claims that it is Beza who mischaracterizes the concrete/abstract distinction: ‘you [Beza] consider concrete things that are abstract’¹²—that is to say, Beza, in accepting ‘man is God’ (without the demonstrative ‘this’), treats ‘man’ as a concrete noun when in fact it is according to Andreae abstract.¹³ In Andreae’s analysis, then, Beza’s predication is false because the subject does not successfully refer to Christ, but merely to the (independent) human nature, the nature outside the union, or abstract nature. Despite the impression that this context might give, however, Andreae’s distinction is not entirely unprincipled or ad hoc. He is building on the basic insight, shared with Beza, that an abstract noun signifies ‘a certain form considered by itself apart from the subject in which it exists . . . either only mentally or actually abstracted’.¹⁴ But there is a crucial difference: Andreae understands abstraction to consist in the (mental or real) removal of the relevant form—paradigmatically an accidental form—taking it as something excluding its subject (‘from this subject it can actually be removed and abstracted, with the subject’s substance remaining sound. . . . By the term “abstract” is signified only one thing, namely, the form’);¹⁵ Beza, contrariwise, follows the Scholastics and understands such terms to signify an accidental form existing in a subject (‘For abstract is said in the Schools

¹¹ For Andreae, then, instances of praedictio inusitata assert the sameness* of two substances. Someone minded to understand Luther’s praedicatio identica as a case of praedicatio inusitata in the later sense would probably read the treatment of predication in the passage from Luther’s Tischrede discussed in section 1.1.1.2, pp. 47–53, along similar lines to those Andreae proposes here. But the two theories are quite distinct. For an excellent discussion of praedicatio inusistata in the later Brenzian tradition—specifically, in Meisner—see Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik, 61–92. ¹² Andreae, Acta, 322; Armstrong and Mallinson, 389. ¹³ For the discussion of this case between Andreae and Beza, see Andreae, Acta, 227; Armstrong and Mallinson, 274. ¹⁴ Andreae, Acta, 224; Armstrong and Mallinson, 270–1. For Beza, see Andreae, Acta, 221–2; Armstrong and Mallinson, 268. ¹⁵ Andreae, Acta, 224; Armstrong and Mallinson, 271.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

231

(in Scholis) to be not whatever is removed from something, but rather what is understood to be the form which accidentally exists in something’).¹⁶ It is not completely clear to me how the material on the concrete/abstract distinction, just discussed, should be integrated with Andreae’s claim, quoted a little earlier, that concrete nouns signify particulars and abstract nouns (whether linguistically abstract or concrete) universals. Perhaps he is thinking that concrete nouns signify persons (or, rather, supposita more generally), and abstract nouns signify items independently of their existing in or as persons (or supposita); universals would certainly count as instances of this latter kind of item, but would not exhaust the possible varieties of such items (which could include non-personal particulars considered independently of whole persons). But even this reading cannot be quite right, since ‘Word’ (naming the second person of the Trinity prior to the hypostatic union) clearly signifies a person—albeit independently of the hypostatic union—but is counted as an abstract noun in Andreae’s classification. I would guess that he simply had not thought the matter through. At any rate, the discussion of the semantics gives us a good handle on the way in which Andreae understands the metaphysics of the Incarnation: two particular objects, somehow the same* person as each other. Andreae talks about the union in terms of the ‘communication of subsistence’ (to the human nature), and in Brenzian terms of the mutual communication of the natures to each other. For example, he says the following about the communication of subsistence: Dr Jakob [Andreae]: I deny simply that the human nature received only subsistence from the Logos. Dr Beza: I say that this communication of subsistence is the foundation of the communication of properties. Dr Jakob:

I say the same thing.¹⁷

¹⁶ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 221–2; Armstrong and Mallinson, 268, slightly altered. ¹⁷ Andreae, Acta, 246; Armstrong and Mallinson, 294. The discussion proceeds to a debate about the nature of the communication of subsistence, which Andreae understands in terms of the communication of natures just discussed. Andreae has taken the phrase ‘communication of subsistence’ from his younger associate Stephan Gerlach (1546–1612), who uses it in his Assertio piae sanaque doctrinae de divina maiestate Christi hominis (Tübingen, 1585), c. 3 (p. 57). As Gerlach understands it, the ‘subsistence . . . and the deity’ are communicated to the assumed nature, and this communication is what it is for the person to be communicated (see e.g. Gerlach, Assertio, c. 4 (p. 78))—a variant, I take it, of Wigand’s language of the communication of the person discussed in 5.2.1, p. 171. Gerlach himself talks of the communication of subsistence in response to his opponent, the Jesuit Jan Buys (Busaeus; 1547–1611), who discusses the supposital union in terms of the divine person’s giving his subsistence to the assumed nature (see e.g. his De persona Christi disputatio theologica contra ubiquitarios (Mainz, 1583), c. 4, th. 39 (fo. D3v)). I am not sure of the ultimate origins of the phrase, though it bears a close resemblance to the ways in which Thomist commentators of the earlier sixteenth century discuss Aquinas’s claim that the assumed nature is ‘brought into communion (communionem) with the existence (esse)’ of the divine person: see Aquinas, ST III, q. 2, a. 6 ad 2. At any rate, the notion of the communication of subsistence becomes absolutely central to Lutheran Christology in the seventeenth century, and is something I hope to explore further in future research.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

232

 

Here the communication of subsistence is the ‘foundation’ of the communicatio idiomatum. But the same function—grounding the communicatio idiomatum—is also ascribed to the union of natures: The union of natures and communication of properties differ amongst themselves quite a bit. For the communication of properties is like the effect and consequence of the union of natures. So even though they occur at the same time, nevertheless they exist by reason of the order of nature as former and latter.¹⁸

I take it, then, that the communication of subsistence is in some sense the same as the union of natures. And note Andreae’s use of the phrase ‘order of nature’: this is precisely a way of talking about the ‘logical ordering’ that is a feature of my UC-ordering analysis. As in Brenz, the union of natures is itself identified as their communion: Two different natures meet together in the one person of the Son of God, without any confusion, and they are not simply united, but they are united such that the one communicates to the other its own essence with its own properties. Thus the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, assuming human nature into the unity of his own person, communicates the essence of his divinity and his properties to it.¹⁹

Here, Andreae contrasts the communion of natures with their being ‘simply united’. Elsewhere, he holds that that union without communication of natures is satisfied by (e.g.) the mere immediate juxtaposition of two physical objects: ‘two feather pens’ for example.²⁰ So I take it that there are varieties of union relation, and the communion of two natures is one such variety. If this is right, then Andreae here affirms the same explanatory two-stage UC-ordering as he affirmed in the Formula of Concord, the one formulated by the early Brenz, namely, (sameness* of person ! (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticumB)).²¹ Indeed, a very distinctive part of the exchange between Beza and Andreae pertains precisely to the correct interpretation of Brenz’s discrimen argument— which, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, forms part of Brenz’s discussion of the varieties of UC-ordering. According to Beza, Brenz identified the hypostatic union as the genus maiestaticum, and in so doing thus rejected the notion of a communion of natures distinct from the genus maiestaticum: ‘Dr Brenz has explained that the passage in Jn 1[:14], “The Word became flesh”, is not about the union of natures, but rather about the communication of the properties of divinity, and the nature of the gifts by which Christ surpasses Peter.’²² Beza’s account—which seems more or less to represent Brenz’s late view—forces Andreae to be clear about the view he adopts in the colloquy. Andreae proposes ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²²

Andreae, Acta, 264; Armstrong and Mallinson, 315. Andreae, Acta, 231; Armstrong and Mallinson, 278. Andreae, Acta, 230; Armstrong and Mallinson, 278. ²¹ For a summary, see Table 1. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 295; Armstrong and Mallinson, 348.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

233

that we should understand Brenz’s discrimen argument not metaphysically but epistemically: This is the reason he [viz. Brenz] defined the personal union by the communicatio idiomatum: the mystery of the hypostatic union is established in such a way that it cannot be defined a priori. Therefore in those places in which we do not have specific differences, we replace them with things that are more known, whether properties, or accidents, or operations. These things are distinguished from one another such that what they are can be understood by other means. . . . So since we understand the mystery of the personal union of the divine and human natures in Christ much less [than we understand the union of soul and body], like people who have no knowledge of ourselves, Dr Brenz and his colleagues, having followed the lead of the Holy Scripture and the holy Fathers, described this miraculous union by the communication of divine majesty, by which the difference (discrimen) between Peter and the man Christ, who otherwise have many things in common, may be observed.²³

The idea is that the communication of majesty is more evident than the hypostatic union (the communion of natures), and thus if we wish to discern a difference between Peter and the man Christ we should start not from the hypostatic union but from the genus maiestaticum. But this does not mean that the genus maiestaticum explains the hypostatic union; indeed, Andreae maintains, quite the contrary: he ascribes to Brenz the view (which he evidently here accepts) that the genus maiestaticum is simply a necessary consequence of the union/communion of natures, and reinterprets Brenz’s discrimen question epistemically, in contrast to Brenz’s metaphysical understanding. Andreae, then, interprets the discrimen argument in line with his revised account of the UC-ordering. As just seen, Andreae holds that the union or communion of natures—the hypostatic union—is basic, and grounds the communicatio idiomatum. He thus rejects the view that the union is grounded on some further relation between the divine person and the human nature—that is to say, on the supposital union. Andreae expressly contrasts his account of the hypostatic union—according to which the two concrete objects, the Son of God and the Son of Man, are the same* person—to the supposital-union theory that he ascribes (rightly, as we shall see) to Beza: When he [viz. Brenz] was arguing against Peter Martyr (who had written that it is sufficient that the deity, though immense and infinite in its own hypostasis, supports and sustains the humanity wherever it will be), he added these words: certainly, should you rightly examine Martyr’s position regarding the personal union, which I mentioned above, you will find that he makes the union between

²³ Andreae, Acta, 295–6; Armstrong and Mallinson, 349–50.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

234

 

the Son of God and the Son of Mary the same kind of union as that between the Son of God and all creatures, or anyhow between him and Peter and Paul and all the saints. It simply is not true that Brenz asserted the same union of Christ and Peter with God, like the one that he demonstrated follows from the description of Peter Martyr, which is the most absurd position of all, that it is sufficient for the personal union that it supports (fulcire) and sustains (sustentare) in its own hypostasis.²⁴

This constitutes a standard Brenzian rejection (and misunderstanding) of the supposital union as simply God’s causally sustaining the whole universe. On the question of semantics, Andreae apparently understand the suppositalunion theory to commit its adherents to CN-semantics. Among the ‘dogmas’ judged by the Württemberg theologians at the colloquy to ‘conflict with Holy Scripture’,²⁵ the first is the following: Affirming, when we say God is man and man is God, that this is only an expression and a certain manner of speaking; that God in fact has nothing really in common with humanity and humanity has nothing really in common with divinity (that is, truly and actually); and that in the proposition, ‘man is God’, the term ‘man’ does not signify a true man, but rather the Son of God who sustains the human nature. And so they interpret the proposition ‘God suffered’ as follows: God, that is, humanity united to the divinity, suffered, and ‘man is omnipotent’, that is divinity united to humanity is omnipotent.²⁶

Andreae here gives three deviant cases (as he takes it) in his opponents’ Christological semantics: predications ‘in natural matter’ (‘man is God’); predications that he (and his opponents) would take to fall under the genus idiomaticum (‘God suffered’); and predications that he (but not his opponents) would take to fall under the genus maiestaticum. The third of these I defer until its proper place, later in this chapter. The first sounds strikingly like an objection that Luther raises at one point to a possible interpretation of the semantics of Christological predication given the supposital union. (I discussed the relevant passage from Luther in section 1.1.1.2, pp. 47–53.) Obviously, an adherent of the supposital-union theory can hold that

²⁴ Andreae, Acta, 295, Armstrong and Mallinson, 348–9. ²⁵ Andreae, Acta, 200; Armstrong and Mallinson, 242. ²⁶ Andreae, Acta, 200; Armstrong and Mallinson, 242–3, slightly altered. In the Epitome, Andreae holds that his opponents, who accept the supposital union, must believe that ‘God’, in ‘God is man’, ‘signifies a man sustained by God’, or ‘this man whose human nature is sustained by the Son of God’ (Andreae, Epitome colloquii Montisbelgartensis (Tübingen, 1588), 25; see too Epitome, 38). Clearly, adherents of the supposital union would deny both of these locutions on the grounds that they posit two persons (i.e. two items signified by concrete nouns), and on the face of it ascribing these claims to adherents of the supposital union can be nothing other than the result of deep misunderstanding. Perhaps Andreae is using his own semantics of linguistically concrete nouns, according to which such nouns in the context of the hypostatic union signify items within the union, be they persons or natures. But it is hard to say.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

235

‘man’ in this predication signifies a ‘true man’, since they can hold that it signifies the (divine) person, and this person is a ‘true man’—just as Luther does. Andreae is labouring under the Brenzian misapprehension that ‘man’ must signify the human nature, and would thus presumably to construe the predication in terms of his own account according to which the man (the assumed human nature) and God are the same* person. And this is something that is excluded on the supposital-union theory, which requires the strict identity of man and God in the Christological context (that is to say, the self-identity of the divine person, here suggested by the two concrete nouns). The second—that we should construe ‘God suffered’ as ‘humanity united to divinity suffered’—is a way of talking about CN-semantics, one that Andreae has taken from Beza (as I shall show in section 7.2.2). Andreae rejects CN-semantics and its cognates on the grounds that, given CN-semantics, it seems to him that the relevant Christological predications end up being false. He states repeatedly that given CN-semantics such predications ‘are not even verbal’. The following discussion is characteristic: Dr Jakob: . . . Your teaching is the same [as Nestorius’s], when you interpret this proposition in this way: the Son of God suffered, that is, the flesh of the Son of God suffered, which was united with the Son of God. But the communication of passion (in your opinion) cannot even verbally be attributed to the Son of God, since it was proper to the human nature, which is not fitting for the Son of God. Dr Beza: We have nothing in common with the error of Nestorius, since we admit this enunciation: God suffered; a man is omnipotent; which Nestorius did not do, but rather attacked them. Dr Jakob: You do indeed admit the phrase in order that you may seem to agree with us and dissent from Nestorius, but when it comes to explaining it is discovered that your explanation and opinion are the same as those of Nestorius. . . . To be born of a woman, which is a property of human nature, does not really correspond to the Son of God, which you also say, even while you assert that these two propositions are equivalent: ‘The Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary’, and ‘The flesh united to the Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary’, without real communication of property.²⁷ Underlying the exchange is an assumption which both Andreae and Beza share, namely, that Nestorius denied the truth of the relevant Christological predications—predications that are mandated by Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Hence when Andreae claims that the predication construed in accordance with CN-semantics is ‘not even verbal’, and thus that accepting CN-semantics for

²⁷ Andreae, Acta, 254; Armstrong and Mallinson, 304.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

236

 

Christological predications amounts to Nestorianism, he means to claim that construing the predication in accordance with CN-semantics will yield the incorrect truth-value: the predication will, in short, be false. According to Andreae, CNsemantics commits the theologian to denying that the relevant predication ‘really corresponds to the Son of God’—which, I take it, is a way of claiming that it commits the theologian to denying that the relevant property is borne by the Son of God. Here again, then, Andreae holds that predications that fail to be realf fail to be realt. Beza evidently holds that fundamentality is not a requirement for truth, and, understandably, simply reiterates the claim that, construed in accordance with CN-semantics, the relevant predications come out as true—which is sufficient to show that his position is not that of Nestorius, since on Nestorius’s understanding the predications are false. Andreae and Beza, in short, agree on the truth-values of the Christological predications here under discussion, and Andreae’s assertion that Beza only ‘seem[s] to agree’ with him is in fact false— albeit that they accept different semantics for Christological predications. Andreae also holds that there is something artificial in claiming that CNsemantics is the correct semantics for Christological predication, and drolly inquires: ‘I ask, pray, in what grammar or tongue is this found—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, or German—in which “man” signifies the same things as “deity united to humanity”?’²⁸ As we shall see, Beza denies that such claims are literally true, and so is untouched by Andreae’s quibble here. Clearly, passages such as CN present interpretative difficulties for Andreae. At one point he confronts relevant Cyrilline passages, and offers a rather Brenzian reading of them: Just as he [viz. Nestorius] attacked these assertions which run, ‘God was born of a woman, suffered, was crucified’, so also the one that runs, ‘Divinity was born of a woman, suffered, was crucified.’ Cyril said to the contrary, ‘The Word suffered impassibly.’ He suffers, he says, when his body suffers, to the extent that that to which he communicated his entire self was said to be proper to him. Yet God himself remains incapable of suffering, to the extent that he possesses the unique property that he cannot suffer. . . . Here . . . Cyril employ[s] the terms ‘God’ and ‘divinity’ as synonyms without distinction, and attribute[s] in this way the passions of Christ to the divinity. . . . Since in fact the assumed body of the Son of God was his own, no manner of suffering without divinity could befall him that would not also redound (redundaret) to the divinity itself.²⁹

When he claims that the suffering ‘redound[ed] to the divinity itself ’, and that we should understand ‘divinity’ to be synonymous with ‘God’, Andreae means that

²⁸ Andreae, Acta, 272; Armstrong and Mallinson, 324. ²⁹ Andreae, Acta, 238–9; Armstrong and Mallinson, 286–7, altered.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

237

the second person of the Trinity bore the relevant properties.³⁰ Thus he claims elsewhere that ‘the abuses extended not to the Son of Man alone but also to the Son of God’³¹—construed, I assume, in accordance with some variety of H-semantics. And Andreae claims that this is in line with Cyril’s teaching in texts such as CN since, he alleges, what Cyril means in claiming that the body is proper to the divine person is that the divine person ‘communicated his entire self to the body’—in line with Andreae’s own teaching on the metaphysics of the Incarnation, according to which the Son of God and the Son of Man become the same* person, and the Son of God communicated divine properties to the Son of Man. As we would expect, Andreae accepts BH-semantics: Dr Beza: We also say that the Son of God has sufferings in common with the united flesh, on account of the union that has been brought about. Dr Jakob: You are speaking with us but not thinking with us. How can you attribute sufferings to the whole person when you say that they cannot be attributed to the divine nature in any way, not even verbally? Dr Beza: The whole man is called rational, though only his soul is rational and not his body as well, which is devoid of reason.³² Obviously, the ‘divine nature’ here is the divine person. So according to Andreae the relevant properties are borne by the divine person, and this bearing relationship is necessary for the truth of the relevant predications (‘how can you attribute sufferings to the whole person when you say that they cannot be attributed to the divine nature’—i.e. when you claim that they are not borne by the divine person). I assume that this argument is not supposed to appeal to a specific principle about actions and passions, since the claim about actions and passions is most plausibly defended in the context of the genus idiomaticum on the grounds that it is entailed by a general principle to the effect that properties (and not just actions and passions) should be attributed ‘not to the natures but rather to the whole person’. An assumption in the discussion of the genus idiomaticum is that what is at issue is the communication of human properties generally, not just the communication of actions and passions. But Andreae does not make his reasoning explicit.

7.1.2 The Metaphysics and Semantics of the Genus Maiestaticum As Andreae notes, both sides in the debate agree that ‘besides the properties of the natures in Christ there are also in Christ the man created gifts, by which he is ³⁰ On this, see also Andreae, Acta, 258; Armstrong and Mallinson, 308. ³¹ Andreae, Acta, 199; Armstrong and Mallinson, 241. ³² Andreae, Acta, 256; Armstrong and Mallinson, 306, altered. Note that here and in similar cases ‘the divine nature’ refers to the divine person—given Andreae’s rules about the reference of linguistically abstract nouns in the union.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

238

 

superior to all human beings and angels’.³³ What is subject to dispute is the communication of divine properties to the human nature. Andreae summarizes a tradition stemming from Brenz’s later Christology in maintaining that there are basically five such properties, and in each case gives relevant Scriptural evidence: omnipotence,³⁴ omniscience,³⁵ omnipresence,³⁶ vivifying power,³⁷ and adoration.³⁸ These attributes are not replicas of the divine attributes—‘a created omnipotence and divinity . . . equal to an essential deity and omnipotence’³⁹— but the ipsissima divine attributes, communicated to the human nature and in some sense borne by it (the communication is ‘real’),⁴⁰ though without becoming anything like inherent accidents of the nature: ‘These are not accidents either in God or in the assumed nature but rather essential attributes (essentialia) in God, personally granted in the assumed man’;⁴¹ they exist ‘in the assumed humanity’,⁴² and the human ‘nature becomes a participant, and is united with the infinite nature, by participation in which it possesses that which the infinite nature is by essence’.⁴³ There is nothing much surprising here, as far as I can see. Andreae is forced by Beza to confront head on the Augustinian objection about the identity of the various divine attributes with each other and the divine essence (thus Beza says, ‘I especially ask the reason why eternity and infinity also have not been communicated to the assumed nature by the Logos’)⁴⁴ and in responding Andreae summarizes the later Brenzian view that the communicated attributes are those associated in some way with divine activities: You are asking the reason why eternity and infinity have not been communicated to the humanity, so that we can say that Christ’s humanity is from eternity, is infinite, in just the same manner we say that it is omnipotent, omniscient. I answer that the manner and mode of the divine attributes and of their communication is not the same. The reason I say this is that in the divine essence certain substantial actions are energetic, such as wisdom, power, life, justice, mercy, etc. But there are others which . . . are occupied with and reflect the essence of the deity, and are not energetic, such as being from eternity, being essentially infinite, incorporeal, immaterial, and the like. These are said to be ³³ Andreae, Acta, 194; Armstrong and Mallinson, 236. ³⁴ Andreae, Acta, 284; Armstrong and Mallinson, 336–7. ³⁵ Andreae, Acta, 301; Armstrong and Mallinson, 355. ³⁶ Andreae, Acta, 313; Armstrong and Mallinson, 368–9. On the modes of bodily presence, see Acta, 317–18; Armstrong and Mallinson, 374–5. ³⁷ Andreae, Acta, 334; Armstrong and Mallinson, 391–2. ³⁸ Andreae, Acta, 343–4; Armstrong and Mallinson, 402–3. ³⁹ Andreae, Acta, 259; Armstrong and Mallinson, 310. ⁴⁰ Andreae, Acta, 195; Armstrong and Mallinson, 238. ⁴¹ Andreae, Acta, 209, marginal note (O); Armstrong and Mallinson, 253, altered. ⁴² Andreae, Acta, 243; Armstrong and Mallinson, 291. ⁴³ Andreae, Acta, 208, marginal note (I); Armstrong and Mallinson, 252, altered. ⁴⁴ Beza apud Andreae, 271; Armstrong and Mallinson, 323.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

239

communicated to the humanity, since deity itself was communicated, and they cannot be separated from it. But the humanity is not specifically designated by these attributes, since they are not actions perfecting the human nature, like the proper ones mentioned in the first order perfect it, and it is specifically designated by them. On this account, even though the human nature possesses communicated eternity and an infinite essence, dwelling in itself bodily, just as with omnipotence, nevertheless it is not called infinite and eternal just as it is truly called omnipotent.⁴⁵

So while the divine attributes are all absolutely identical, God is said to be able to act in different ways, and in virtue of this certain attributes—the ‘energetic’ ones— can be predicated of the assumed nature (‘it is truly called omnipotent’; ‘it is omnipotent, omniscient’), in virtue of communication by possession-withoutinherence. And note here Andreae’s explicit affirmation of both the metaphysical and the linguistic genus maiestaticum: the real communication of the various powers is sufficient for the humanity’s being ‘designated’ in certain ways. Here then it seems that the communication of the latter (non-energetic) attributes is simply identical to the hypostatic union (sameness* of person); the communication of the former comprises the genus maiestaticum. Beza accepts that all the attributes are communicated in the sense of being hypostatically united to a human nature; but he claims that none of them are communicated in any other way: If by communication we understand union, then I concede that not only omnipotence but also the rest of the attributes of deity have been communicated to the human nature. For since the human nature has been united with the divine, and both God and man are one person, therefore omnipotence has also been united, which cannot be separated from deity.⁴⁶

In a passage just quoted the genus maiestaticum strictly speaking is held to consist in the communication of activity—‘actions perfecting the human nature’. But Andreae more usually talks at Montbéliard as though the genus maiestaticum consists in the (antecedent) communication of a power and not an action. Thus he distinguishes the case of the Exaltation from that of Christ’s earthly life by claiming that, in the latter state, Christ possessed this majesty of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and the power of vivifying, insofar as he was man (on account of the personal union), even when he was in the womb of his mother, but he did not put it into effect or use. But following his birth into the world, so often as there was need, he demonstrated it and used it in miracles.⁴⁷

⁴⁵ Andreae, Acta, 271–2; Armstrong and Mallinson, 323–4. ⁴⁶ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 264; Armstrong and Mallinson, 315. ⁴⁷ Andreae, Acta, 198; Armstrong and Mallinson, 240.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

240

 

So in during his earthly life Christ’s humanity possesses the relevant powers, and only occasionally brings out their associated activities. Andreae, as we have seen, argues that the genus maiestaticum is a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union. So given that these attributes can be predicated of the earthly Christ’s humanity, it follows that power-possession is sufficient for predication, even in the absence of power-exercise.⁴⁸ Andreae says much the same here: ‘And so (on account of the personal union and communication of properties) we believe that Christ also is omnipotent according to his humanity, or that the human nature in Christ is omnipotent (which is the same thing).’⁴⁹ What characterizes Christ’s earthly life is in fact the presence of additional human features: weakness, ignorance, and suchlike.⁵⁰ What we have here, then, is the rejection of all forms of AGM-semantics for unadorned BGM-semantics. So Andreae abandons his reductionist account of the genus maiestaticum (according to which the relevant predications are grounded simply on the divine person’s use of the human nature in the exercise of divine power), and instead adopts Brenz’s view that the powers conferred on the human nature are themselves exercised by that nature. Perhaps Andreae was influenced in this by Chemnitz’s similar shift in the second edition of De duabus, outlined in section 6.3.2, pp. 218–19. But it is hard to be sure. In line with this, Andreae treats the fire–iron analogy as an instance in which the iron, not the fire, is responsible for exercising the relevant power: They [viz. the orthodox Fathers] have in fact not defined the personal union of the two natures in Christ without communication. To explain it they employed the analogies of red hot iron and of the soul with the body. For two substances run together in red hot iron, iron and fire. . . . For fire communicates itself along with its properties to the iron such that the whole thing is rendered red hot, as if it were changed into fire. This iron burns; wood is drilled through in a moment by this iron, which the iron would not do without the fire, nor fire do without iron. And the iron is not changed into the substance of fire on account of the communication of fire and its properties, nor destroyed, but is lit up. . . . The iron becomes red hot.⁵¹

As we shall see, one thing that worries Beza about the whole Lutheran position is that it ascribes to the human nature properties that are incompatible with it; and part of the reason for its doing this, according to Beza, is that Andreae has made a semantic error, confusing concrete (terms signifying the person) and abstract (terms signifying the natures). We have already seen part of the way in which Andreae treats the concrete/abstract distinction. What he says has a direct bearing on the semantics of the genus maiestaticum. Central to Andreae’s Christological ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹

For a summary of Andreae’s views, see Tables 2 and 3. Andreae, Acta, 195–6; Armstrong and Mallinson, 238. See e.g. Andreae, Acta, 209, marginal note P (Armstrong and Mallinson, 253). Andreae, Acta, 231; Armstrong and Mallinson, 279.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

241

semantics—something that he inherited directly from Brenz’s distinction between BH-semantics and BGM-semantics—is the claim that there is a radical asymmetry between Christological predications with ‘God’ as the subject and those with ‘man’ as the subject. Beza expressly asks whether the ‘structure (ratio)’ of ‘ “the Son of Man is omnipotent” and “the Son of God was crucified” is the same’.⁵² Andreae responds in the negative (for ease of reference, I number the sentences): [1] I contend that the cause of these two utterances is one and the same, but the structure is not also the same for this reason. [2] For the cause of these two assertions is one and the same, namely the union of the natures in the person of the Son of God. [3] In fact unless this hypostatic union had happened, God would never be crucified, nor could a man have become omnipotent. [4] Therefore we hold that from this union the Son of Man became truly omnipotent and that he is called the Son of God and suffered. [5] But the structure of these assertions is very far different on account of the distinction of the natures by which they are considered in themselves. [5] For the divine nature is unchangeable, and no perfection or imperfection is able to happen to it. [6] But the human nature is changeable, and it can be humiliated and exalted, debilitated and strengthened. [7] It follows from this that divinity does not participate in passions in the same manner as the humanity participated in the glory and majesty proper to divinity. [8] For human nature can receive omnipotence into itself, but divinity cannot receive passions in the same manner, such that it can be wounded or injured.⁵³

(1) the ‘structure’ that Andreae talks about is something like the ‘deep grammar’ of the relevant locutions. Thus, (2)–(4), while both have the same truth-makers (the same ‘causes’, the two natures, united in one person), the natures are, (5)–(6), subject to properties in different ways—the divine nature is not subject to change, whereas the human nature is. And (7) this means that the divine nature cannot be the subject of human properties, whereas (8) the human nature is in principle subject to (some) divine properties. (Andreae is not, I think, arguing from mutability to being possibly subject to divine properties; he believes merely that mutability is a necessary condition for being so subject.) In terms of the contrast in deep grammar, what all this means is that ‘Son of God’ in the predications under discussion (i.e. the genus idiomaticum, construed in accordance with BH-semantics) signifies something that bears human properties in virtue of one but not both of its natures (i.e. the human nature, not the divine); whereas ‘Son of Man’ in the predications under discussion (i.e. the genus maiestaticumB as restricted by Brenzian communicatio) signifies something that has divine properties in virtue of not one but both of its natures.

⁵² Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 239; Armstrong and Mallinson, 287. ⁵³ Andreae, Acta, 240; Armstrong and Mallinson, 288.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

242

 

This kind of asymmetry is a mark of Brenz-inspired Christologies; we find no such thing in Chemnitz, for example, or in Luther. Beza denies any asymmetry, since he holds that in both cases the subject of predication is the (divine) person (‘I say that not only is the cause of each predicate and enunciation the same, but that the logic is the same as well’).⁵⁴ For Andreae, contrariwise, the subject of predication in the former case (‘the Son of Man is omnipotent’) is a nature that is the same* person as the divine person, but—in contrast to what Beza would assert—not something identical with the divine person. Beza of course does not think that there is a sense in which the human nature is identical with the divine person; neither does he think that there is a sense in which the human nature is the same* person as the divine person. This is the whole substance of the Christological division between the two theologians. The long passage quoted suggests that Andreae would be highly sympathetic to BMP. Indeed, Andreae includes a long discussion of Christological mereology that confirms his acceptance of principle. The two clearest treatments are the discussions of omnipotence and omnipresence, which I discuss in turn. Andreae’s basic position is that when we claim (e.g.) ‘Christ is omnipotent’, we refer to the whole Christ,⁵⁵ since, as Beza and Andreae both agree, ‘The Christ who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent is not half but whole.’⁵⁶ But Andreae holds—against Beza—that for it to be true that the whole Christ is omnipotent, the humanity must be omnipotent too: Without the humanity Christ is not the whole Christ, but rather merely Logos. But humanity also is required of the whole Christ. When they [viz. Beza] openly exclude the humanity from omnipotence, how can the whole Christ, God and man, be, or be called, omnipotent?⁵⁷

Beza takes Andreae to be committed to the more general principle, GMP, and points out (following (I assume) Calvin’s appeal to the totus/totum distinction from Peter Lombard) that GMP seems to be false: The term ‘whole (totus)’ is the description of a person, who is omnipotent. But the word ‘entire (totum)’ refers to natures, of which only one is omnipotent, namely the divine nature, but not the human nature. So we say that the whole Christ is omnipotent, but not the whole of Christ, that is, his humanity also.⁵⁸

On this analysis, a whole’s being φ does not require each proper part of the whole’s being φ. In the Responsio, Beza makes his thinking crystal clear: ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸

Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 240; Armstrong and Mallinson, 288, altered. Andreae, Acta, 307; Armstrong and Mallinson, 362. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 308; Armstrong and Mallinson, 323. Andreae, Acta, 308; Armstrong and Mallinson, 363. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 308; Armstrong and Mallinson, 363.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

243

When we distinguish the whole Christ from the whole of Christ, we do not join this particle ‘whole’ to Christ grammatically, as ‘whole’ is opposed to ‘half ’, but we signify the appellation ‘Christ’ so as to be considered sometimes as σύνολος, a certain whole one thing without considering the natures from which that thing, one καθ᾽ ὑπόστασιν [i.e. according to hypostasis], is constituted.⁵⁹

In short, talk of the whole Christ is a way of speaking of Christ without qualification. Still the argument is effective against Andreae only if BMP is thought to entail GMP. And it is not at all clear that it does. BMP occurs again in the discussion of omnipresence. Andreae moves directly from the claim that ‘Christ the man’ is omnipresent to the claim that Christ is present ‘in his own assumed nature’,⁶⁰ and thence to the claim that ‘it is attributed to Christ’s humanity that it also, itself, fills all things with the divinity, with which it has been personally united’.⁶¹ Andreae reports various counterinstances to GMP proposed by the Reformed theologians (on the assumption that counterinstances to GMP are counterinstances to BMP too): a planet is a part of its orbit, but it does not follow from that that the planet simultaneously occupies its whole orbit; Antwerp occupies part of the ocean, but it does not follow from that that it occupies the total volume that the ocean occupies.⁶² The examples are to do with extension, and thus particularly well-suited to act as counterinstances to GMP, since it is the case for all quantitative predicates that being true of the whole is incompatible with being true of any proper part: necessarily, any extended proper part of an extended substance is smaller than the substance. One way for Andreae to reply would be to point out that BMP does not entail GMP—and thus that counterexamples to GMP are not ipso facto counterexamples to BMP. Sadly he does not avail himself of this strategy. (Perhaps he is in fact committed to GMP, and for this reason accepts BMP. I do not know.) What he says instead is that, in the Christological case, the relevant parts are parts not of an extended substance but of something which is omnipresent without extension.⁶³ But in responding in this way, Andreae has lost track of his own position. He argues from BMP to bodily omnipresence; so he cannot respond to counterinstances to BMP by denying its relevance to bodily omnipresence without simply undermining his own case. Beza responds laconically: ‘I say that the man Christ fills all things, and is present everywhere, but not his humanity.’⁶⁴

⁵⁹ Beza, Ad acta colloquii Montisbelgardensis Tubingae edita . . . responsio (Geneva, 1587), 122. ⁶⁰ Andreae, Acta, 312; Armstrong and Mallinson, 368. ⁶¹ Andreae, Acta, 315; Armstrong and Mallinson, 371. ⁶² Andreae, Acta, 315–16; Armstrong and Mallinson, 372. ⁶³ Andreae, Acta, 316; Armstrong and Mallinson, 373. ⁶⁴ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 319; Armstrong and Mallinson, 376. This is not the only instance in which Andreae allows himself to be distracted by the example, rather than focusing on the issue

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

244

 

Still, assuming that predication tracks power-possession rather than merely power-exercise, Andreae’s acceptance of BGM-semantics (as opposed to either of his earlier variants) puts him in a stronger position (in terms of Chalcedonian orthodoxy) at Montbéliard than he was either at Maulbronn or in the Epitome. For he now has a way of predicating the relevant divine attributes (e.g. omnipotence, omnipresence) of the Son of Man during Christ’s earthly life—something that his commitments in these earlier texts prevented him from doing.

7.2 Beza’s Response 7.2.1 The Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union In contrast to his discussion of the issues in the 1560s, Beza in the colloquy affirms the supposital union, and seems just to assume its truth without treating it as in any sense controversial: ‘I do not deny that the Logos communicates its own hypostasis to the assumed nature, and thus [that the assumed nature] is personally sustained by him [i.e. the Logos]. But I do think that this union should not be mixed up with the communication of idiomata or properties (proprietatum).’⁶⁵ A little later in the exchange, Andreae attributes the following view to Beza: If his divinity is removed from Christ’s passion, and you admit no other communication than that which sustained the human nature lest it succumb to suffering, Christ will have this in common with all the saints: if indeed God sustained all the saints in the suffering, lest they succumb. But here the manner is far different, since the sins which offended the infinite God had to be expiated by passion and death. But flesh was not able to satisfy God’s infinite wrath by means of its suffering, however much it was sustained by God. . . . Upon him, God the Son, all injuries and slanders have superabundantly been poured out, which his enemies employed against his soul and body. The Son of God not only sustained and strengthened the human nature in the midst of them, such that it was able to

actually relevant to the discussion. I return to a similar case in my discussion of Beza’s treatment of the soul–body analogy in section 7.2.1. ⁶⁵ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 245; Armstrong and Mallinson, 294, altered. The Latin of the first part of this is a bit awkward: ‘Non nego, quod λόγος assumptae naturae hypostasin suam communicet, et ita personaliter ab eo sustentatur’, translated by Armstrong and Mallinson as ‘I do not deny that the Word communicates its own hypostasis to the assumed nature, and so is personally sustained by it.’ At first glance the subject of ‘sustentatur’ seems to be ‘λόγος’, as suggested in Armstrong and Mallinson. But in fact it is not: ‘ab eo’ cannot, by reason of gender, mean ‘by the nature’, and so must mean ‘by the Word’; and the subject of ‘sustentatur’ is thus ‘natura assumpta’. And this is what we would expect given the metaphysics of the hypostatic union. So the text in Armstrong and Mallinson needs to be corrected along the lines I outline here.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

245

endure those sufferings, but he himself also endured and sustained them as God, and did not violently push them away.⁶⁶

In the first sentence here, Andreae ascribes to Beza both CN-semantics and a rejection of the supposital-union theory. I do not know why Andreae should say this. Given the view of Beza’s that Andreae had reported earlier in the Acta, he must have known that the second of these ascriptions was false. In the colloquy, Beza says nothing by way of response. Supposing the incoherence of Andreae’s own Christology, Beza presumably had more important worries to deal with. But in the Responsio he expressly replies to the passage, with considerable poignancy. Having noted that ‘the hypostatic uniting (unitio) takes its name from the word “sustaining” ’, and that the view of Brenz and Andreae that ‘for the human nature to be sustained by the God the Word says nothing more than being supported (fulciri) by his strength and powers (potentia et viribus)’ is ‘a fantasy (somnium)’, he states this: In actual fact, however, since he [viz. Andreae] accepts that which he charges against us, what is this recklessness, in misrepresenting (calumniandi), by the word ‘hypostatic sustaining (sustentationis hypostaticae)’, nothing beyond the support which sustained the flesh of Christ in the κατάρᾳ [i.e. curse] which he endured for us?⁶⁷

Clearly, as the penultimate quotation makes clear, Andreae himself accepts the sense of ‘sustaining’ in which the Word is some kind of support (psychological and otherwise) for the suffering of the humanity—as Beza notes at the very beginning of this sentence. But Beza reacts with great hostility to the suggestion that this is all that is meant by ‘sustaining’ in this context. The reason is that he accepts the supposital union, and that there is a non-causal sense of ‘sustaining’ sufficient to distinguish the case of the hypostatic union from every other kind of divine presence in the universe. Later in the Responsio Beza complains—with some justice—that Andreae and Brenz simply fail to understand the supposital union altogether. Having described in brief compass the hypostatic union in terms that avoid talking about supposital union, Beza comments, Someone failing to understand this sustaining of the human nature by the Word—like someone who wrote somewhere, ‘all things are substantially sustained by God’ (which posited it necessarily follows that all things are substantially Gods)—would thence infer that this man is thus destroyed, and transmuted into the Son of God.⁶⁸

⁶⁶ Andreae, Acta, 257; Armstrong and Mallinson, 307–8. ⁶⁸ Beza, Resp., 186.

⁶⁷ Beza, Resp., 125.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

246

 

The final two clauses are a parody of Andreae’s position. In the rest of the text, Beza distinguishes causal and hypostatic sustaining by alluding to the failure of Brenz and Andreae to make such a distinction, and defines the latter in terms of the unity of the Word and human nature in one subsistence. In contrast to his earlier Christology, Beza restricts the usefulness of the soul– body analogy, something that Andreae appeals to in support of the genus maiestaticum. Beza notes, first of all, that the ‘orthodox Fathers’ accepted ‘the analogy of the union of soul and body . . . in no other way than for the need to show the unity of the person in two perfect natures, and [it] was not treated further than this’, since ‘the analogy differs . . . greatly from the union of the two natures in Christ’.⁶⁹ Later he explains: the analogy would fail to secure the relevant predication relations, and would result in a kind of miaphysite Christ: Body is not in fact soul, and soul is not body, but rather body becomes animated by its union with a soul. So we call man a third something, which is neither body only nor soul only, but rather something composed of both, like parts. But in this mystery of union there is not constituted a third something from God and man which is neither God nor man, but rather Christ, who is nothing other than God and man. So also may they be predicated of each other: in Christ, God is a man, and a man is God.⁷⁰

The final sentence explains what Beza hints at in the first: God is man, but soul is not body—and so the hypostatic union thus construed cannot secure predication of the person. The two central sentences draw out the miaphysite implications of the analogy. (Note in talking about a tertium quid Beza is offering no more than a caricature of a standard miaphysite position, though it is certainly one that we find in some later Patristic Chalcedonian thinkers.) Andreae had used the soul–body analogy in support of the genus maiestaticum: the body is animated or enlivened, and thus takes on the properties of the soul. Beza uses the soul–body analogy as a counterinstance to GMP: ‘the whole man is called rational, though only his soul is rational, and not his body as well, which is devoid of reason’.⁷¹ Andreae agrees that ‘of course a human being is called rational on account of their rational soul’.⁷² Again, one obvious way for Andreae to respond would be to deny the salience to BMP of counterinstances to GMP. But perhaps Andreae accepts GMP; and in any case he again loses track of the dialectic, allowing himself to be distracted by details of Beza’s example. Thus he notes that ‘a disposition of the body is also required for the

⁶⁹ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷²

Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 205–6; Armstrong and Mallinson, 248. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 244; Armstrong and Mallinson, 293, altered. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 256; Armstrong and Mallinson, 306. Andreae, Acta, 256; Armstrong and Mallinson, 306.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

247

enjoyment of reason and intellect’;⁷³ whereas the point is that the whole is said to be rational even though only the soul bears the relevant property: something that Andreae concedes, and that is in itself a counterinstance to GMP. Beza, as I shall show in more detail in section 7.2.2, believes that the genus maiestaticum leads to an unorthodox Christology. But, like Andreae, he is happy to concede that the human nature bears created supernatural qualities as inherent accidents (they are ‘habitual created gifts’⁷⁴ or ‘qualities’,⁷⁵ in it ‘subjectively’).⁷⁶ And he glosses Andreae’s Scriptural texts about Christ’s supernatural knowledge,⁷⁷ moral authority and power,⁷⁸ and majesty in terms of such created gifts.⁷⁹ Vivifying power and adoration are treated differently: Christ’s flesh is vivifying in the sense that ‘Christ abolished death for us in this flesh’;⁸⁰ and it is simply not true that the humanity is adored—it is the man (i.e. the divine person) who is adored.⁸¹ (I return to this last point in section 7.2.2.) Finally, Beza interprets Pope Leo I’s claims about the natures’ communion in activity (discussed in section 0.2.1, p. 14) in terms of unity of purpose: This rule prevails: in this hypostatic union, the natures themselves remain distinct, and each does distinctly what is proper to itself. Accordingly the Logos is distinctly that which is Logos, and it does distinctly that which belongs to the Logos. Just so, flesh remains also distinctly that which is flesh, and accomplishes that which distinctly belongs to flesh. Hence, to cut a long story short: just as we say there are two distinct οὐσίαι [i.e. essences], so there are also two wills and ἐνέργιαι [i.e. activities] and two ἐνεργήματα [i.e. operations] but one ἀποτέλεσμα [i.e. end goal], just as the person is one.⁸²

And this is, as far as I know, the only attempt in the whole period to give an explanation of what joint activity might look like. Andreae comments that the view is ‘the crassest Nestorianism’: but the only gloss that he can offer on the claim that the natures’ ‘actions are in common’ is that they are ‘directed towards one end’.⁸³ So it is not clear that he has anything substantive to add to Beza’s view on this issue, or even that he disagrees with it.

⁷³ Andreae, Acta, 256; Armstrong and Mallinson, 306–7. ⁷⁴ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 265; Armstrong and Mallinson, 317. ⁷⁵ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 299; Armstrong and Mallinson, 353. ⁷⁶ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 207; Armstrong and Mallinson, 250. ⁷⁷ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 208–9, 305, 310; Armstrong and Mallinson, 252–3, 359–60, 365. ⁷⁸ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 209, 290; Armstrong and Mallinson, 253, 342–3. ⁷⁹ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 331; Armstrong and Mallinson, 388. ⁸⁰ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 208; Armstrong and Mallinson, 252; Acta, 270; Armstrong and Mallinson, 322; Acta, 335–6; Armstrong and Mallinson, 392. ⁸¹ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 344; Armstrong and Mallinson, 403. ⁸² Beza apud Andreae, 205; Armstrong and Mallinson, 248, altered. ⁸³ Andreae, Acta, 206, marginal note (A); Armstrong and Mallinson, 249.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

248

 

7.2.2 Christological Semantics The main burden of Beza’s criticism of Andreae is semantic: Andreae’s Christological semantics lead both to Eutychianism and Nestorianism. And the point is not hard to see: From time to time a statement predicated to the whole Christ, because he is a single, indissoluble person, is truly and properly suitable; nonetheless, the particular natures are not changed into each other, not even with respect to the union by which he is named, as when it is said that God redeemed the Church with his own blood, and the Lord of Glory was crucified, and again, the Son of Man on earth speaking with Nicodemus was in heaven: this type of speaking is called by the older theologians the ἀντίδοσις [i.e. exchange], and by our more recent ones the communicatio idiomatum. But this predication cannot be used except with concrete nouns, since the whole person of Christ is never denoted in the abstract by either of his own two natures. And from ignorance of this distinction between concrete and abstract ways of speaking heresy has arisen, first that of Nestorius, who denied that God (that is, the Logos) was both the Son of Mary and had been crucified; and then that of Eutyches, who asserted that the divinity of Christ suffered. The universal rule stands therefore, that one cannot be attributed to the other, neither the one nature to the other, nor the properties of the one nature [to the other].⁸⁴

Beza’s claim is that abstract nouns signify the natures, and concrete nouns the person. (He expressly sees it as a distinct advantage in Chemnitz’s Christology, over and against that of Brenz and Andreae, that Chemnitz follows this rule.)⁸⁵ Beza understands this in straightforwardly Ockhamist fashion: By concrete nouns there is always signified (or, as the Scholastics more precisely say, is connoted), over and above the nature, something that has the nature, whether it is considered in general (as we say ‘man’, that is, an animal endowed with humanity—in which sense ‘man’ is the name of a species, not of an individual) or as it is considered in some individual (as ‘this or that man’, ‘the man Christ’, ‘the man Peter’, etc.).⁸⁶

Concrete nouns signify the nature and connote the suppositum; abstract nouns (I assume) signify the nature without connoting the suppositum.

⁸⁴ Beza apud Andreae, 204; Armstrong and Mallinson, 245–6, altered. (Armstrong and Mallinson translate the second sentence as ‘But this predication cannot be used except with concrete nouns; since the whole person of Christ is never denoted in the abstract, but by either of his own two natures’, and thus, by inadvertently adding ‘but’, effectively reverse Beza’s sense.) ⁸⁵ Beza, Resp., 101, referring to Chemnitz, De duabus (1570), fol. N6v. ⁸⁶ Beza, Resp., 91.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

249

Setting the Ockhamist details aside, failure to follow the rule that concrete nouns signify persons and abstract nouns natures leads to heresy: Nestorius, wrongly supposing that the claim ‘God was the Son of Mary’ entails ‘the divine nature was the Son of Mary’, therefore denied the former claim as well as the latter; and Eutyches, accepting both ‘God suffered’ and the contrapositive of Nestorius’s arguments, therefore affirmed that the divine nature suffered. In both cases the error is the same: accepting the original claim that in all cases Christological predications in concreto entail the same predications in abstracto.⁸⁷ Clearly, Andreae accepts this entailment for at least some Christological predicates—namely, majestic or energetic ones. And his response is highly instructive. ‘The heresy of Nestorius’, he claims, ‘never at all arose from ignorance of these ways of speaking. Nestorius confessed one single person, but denied the communicatio idiomatum. This is where his heresy originated.’⁸⁸ So Andreae wants to affirm something more general than Beza’s criticism: denying the communicatio without accepting what Beza takes to be the deviant implication from concrete to abstract (since, of course, Andreae accepts the implication for at least some predicates). And his criticism of Beza’s assessment of Eutyches amounts to much the same: claiming that the divinity of Christ suffered, for example, ‘does not necessarily make him a heretic, because Cyril said the same thing; his [viz. Eutyches’s] error is rather that he asserted only one nature in Christ after his assumption into Heaven’.⁸⁹ Indeed, Andreae claims, ‘the principle that properties of one nature cannot be attributed to the other is quite false. For this was the Nestorian heresy.’⁹⁰ Nestorius’s view, according to Andreae, consisted in denying Brenzian communicatio, and thus construed, of course, Beza’s Christology will be found wanting. The real problem for Andreae’s view is not the danger of Nestorianism. Beza’s worry is that the divine person cannot bear human attributes, and the human nature cannot bear divine attributes—and Beza and Andreae each understand Brenzian

⁸⁷ Beza notes that precisely the same distinction obtains in the case of God too: thus corresponding concrete and abstract predications in God have different truth-values in ways that would be predicted given the concrete/abstract distinction that Beza maintains to hold in the Christological case: see Beza, Resp., 92. Beza sometimes, like Andreae, talks of an ‘assumed man’ (Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 221, 227, 267; Armstrong and Mallinson, 267, 274, 319), and claims that ‘man became God’ is true (Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 212; Armstrong and Mallinson, 256); likewise he once claims that ‘the essence of divinity was united to the man’ (Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 285; Armstrong and Mallinson, 337). In Resp., Beza makes it clear that he understands talk of an assumed man to be strictly speaking improper: ‘Neither can the Logos be properly speaking be said to have assumed a man, but a human nature, for what is assumed is not the end term of the assumption, but presupposed to the assumption’ (Beza, Resp., 130). The ‘end term’ of the assumption is the incarnate God–man, the second person of the Trinity, as in Beza’s interpretation of the homo assumptus language in the Acta. So despite initial appearances, there is nothing in common between his view and Andreae’s on the matter, since for Andreae the assumed man is not the incarnate God–man, but the human nature. ⁸⁸ Andreae, Acta, 204, marginal note (I); Armstrong and Mallinson, 246, altered. ⁸⁹ Andreae, Acta, 204, marginal note (K); Armstrong and Mallinson, 246, altered. ⁹⁰ Andreae, Acta, 204, marginal note (L); Armstrong and Mallinson, 246, altered.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

250

 

communicatio to entail both kinds of possession. As Beza sees it, each kind of possession would obliterate the relevant nature, à la Eutyches. And it is this problem that Beza exploits—thereby strengthening the cogency of his original analysis in terms of the confusion of concrete and abstract, or endeavouring to do so. Beza makes the first point here: When therefore you say that the divinity suffered, we assert that this is Eutychian, which was also condemned as just as false and erroneous [as the genus maiestaticum]. Suffering is in fact proper only to the human nature, and corresponds to the human nature alone, but in no way to the divinity.⁹¹

Andreae concedes that there is a sense in which Brenzian communicatio entails the truth of ‘the divinity suffered’: not ‘in and of itself ’, but in the union: ‘How can you attribute sufferings to the whole person which consists of a divine and human nature when you say that they cannot be attributed to the divine nature in any way, even verbally?’⁹² (And note, again, that ‘divine nature’ should be construed as divine person.) As we have seen, Andreae does not have a good defence of BMP, and this problem hinders his attempts to respond to Beza’s second point about the genus maiestaticum too. Beza asserts repeatedly that the possession of divine attributes is incompatible with human nature—indeed, such attributes are proper to the divine nature. Here are some examples: It must be proved that the humanity became deity before it can be proved that the human nature became omnipotent.⁹³ . . . If the essential power of God had been really communicated to the humanity, it would follow that it would have been changed into deity, and have become deity. This cannot happen.⁹⁴ . . . If this kind of knowledge [viz. omniscience] had been communicated to Christ’s humanity, it would follow that the humanity had been made the divinity, which is impossible’.⁹⁵ . . . ‘The property and truth of Christ’s body does not admit [omnipresence].⁹⁶ . . . You should prove that the humanity of Christ became deity; then you will have proved also, and I will concede, that it has in itself the power and virtue of vivifying, just as deity has.⁹⁷ . . . Christ’s flesh, that is, his humanity, should not be worshipped, since it is not deity. Nothing should be worshipped that is not God.⁹⁸

And this means that predications such as ‘the humanity is . . . everywhere and omnipotent’ are ‘not even verbal’—they are, in short, false.⁹⁹ ⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹³ ⁹⁴ ⁹⁵ ⁹⁶ ⁹⁷ ⁹⁸ ⁹⁹

Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 255; Armstrong and Mallinson, 305. Andreae, Acta, 256; Armstrong and Mallinson, 306. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 271; Armstrong and Mallinson, 323. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 280; Armstrong and Mallinson, 332. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 311; Armstrong and Mallinson, 367. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 320; Armstrong and Mallinson, 377. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 343; Armstrong and Mallinson, 402. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 358; Armstrong and Mallinson, 419. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 205; Armstrong and Mallinson, 247.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

251

In each case, Beza notes that even though the predication in abstracto is false, this gives no grounds for supposing that the corresponding predication in concreto is false too: We say that the assumed man is true God, omnipotent, omniscient; creator and ruler of heaven and earth; but we do not say that his humanity is omnipotent. You, however, are always confusing the abstract and the concrete.¹⁰⁰ . . . I do not deny that omnipotence was given to this man, since the man is God, but I deny that it was given to the humanity. For just as it cannot be said, ‘humanity is divinity’, so also it cannot be said, ‘humanity is omnipotent.¹⁰¹ . . . You always confuse the abstract and the concrete, and you attribute to the humanity that which should have been attributed to the man.¹⁰²

Beza thereby rejects the Eutychian/Nestorian implication (from concrete to abstract) that he sees as underlying much of Andreae’s Christology.¹⁰³ Equally, Beza rejects BMP, both because it is (as he supposes) false, and because it leads to heretical conclusions. He lays out his position most clearly in the Responsio, where he provides a particularly stark counterexample. If BMP is true, then it should follow that if Christ is omniscient, then his limbs—his ‘legs and arms’—are omniscient too.¹⁰⁴ Andreae could reply by invoking the possibility criterion built into BMP: attributes spread over the whole unless there is some block on their doing so. Still, the counterexamples—this one and some of the ones we considered above—would force Andreae to accept a sense of ‘whole’ similar to that advocated by Beza: ‘the whole Christ’ means ‘Christ unqualified’, ‘Christ as such’. That the combination of BH-semantics and BGM-semantics leads on the face of it to non-Chalcedonian conclusions is rather easy to show, and I have mentioned the basic problem above. Beza raises the objection on several occasions. The issue is this. If the genus maiestaticumB is what explains the truth of Christological locutions in which divine attributes are predicated of (the man) Christ or the Son of Man, and if not all divine attributes are communicated, it will follow that not all such locutions have the correct truth-values—and thus that Andreae’s Christology turns out to be inconsistent with Chalcedon. Beza puts the point in terms of the related issue of the confusion of concrete and abstract in Andreae’s Christology: Who would say that the humanity is God? If what Dr Andreae writes is indeed true, then (since eternity and infinity are obviously not attributed to the humanity it follows that the man cannot be called eternal and infinite) it is also brought about from Dr Andreae’s view that this man cannot be called God.¹⁰⁵

¹⁰⁰ ¹⁰¹ ¹⁰² ¹⁰³ ¹⁰⁴

Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 267; Armstrong and Mallinson, 319. Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 298; Armstrong and Mallinson, 352. Beza apud Andreae, 331; Armstrong and Mallinson, 389. On the talk of an ‘assumed man’, in the first sentence here, see my discussion in n. 87. Beza, Resp., 138. ¹⁰⁵ Beza, Resp., 115.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

252

 

As we have seen, Andreae accepts a semantics for ‘this man is God’ (i.e. BS-semantics) that answers the final part of the objection here. But he says nothing to show how it can be that ‘this man is eternal’ or ‘this man is infinite’ is true: indeed, given everything that he says, they should be false, as Beza points out. Of course, for Beza ‘this man’ refers to something identical with the divine person, as for Chalcedon: and it is true, not false, that the divine person, and thus this man, is eternal and infinite. So, given Chalcedon, Andreae’s Christology, but not Beza’s, yields the wrong truth-values for these predications. Beza attempts to show too that Andreae’s position is incoherent: To concede that it can as truly be said that the man Christ is God as that God is the man, and then to deny that all those things that pertain to God can truly be said of the man, is this not to contradict oneself, and, having posited the antecedent, necessarily to refuse the consequent?¹⁰⁶

Given the Indiscernibility of Identicals, one way in which it would be incoherent to posit the antecedent and refuse the consequent would be if God and man here are strictly speaking identical. And there is little doubt that this is what Beza means (it is, after all, his own opinion). Andreae’s view is in fact not open to this objection, since he denies the identity, and claims instead merely that God and man are the same* person—and sameness* does not satisfy the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Indeed, Andreae supposes that sameness* of person only secures identity of predicates in those cases in which divine attributes can be had by the human nature. Nothing in Beza’s argument should make him change his mind. Still, if Andreae’s view is not incoherent (at least in this respect), the real force of Beza’s objection lies in the claim that Andreae’s Christology fails the test of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. In the Epitome, Andreae seems completely unaware of the force of this worry, even though he addresses various issues brought up in Beza’s Responsio. Rather than attempt to respond to the objection, he simply reiterates and summarizes the material on the five majestic attributes discussed in the original colloquy.¹⁰⁷ I get no sense that he appreciated just how threatening to his position Beza’s objection is. In the Responsio Beza notes too the ambiguous status of the divine attributes relative to the human nature. If they are essential or accidental to the human nature, they will be replicas of the divine attributes; and if not replicas, then one substance (the divine) will inhere in the other (the human). Beza rightly ascribes to Chemnitz the ‘backup’ view (perfugium) that ‘they are attributed to the humanity non-subjectively’—they are possessed without inherence. But, he notes, this is of no help, because being possessed requires being either an essence or a subjectively inherent accident. Andreae’s powers and activities are neither of

¹⁰⁶ Beza, Resp., 171.

¹⁰⁷ See Andreae, Epitome, 30–9.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

253

these things. So according to Beza Andreae’s view provides no grounds for supposing that the attributes are predicated at all—contrary to the theory.¹⁰⁸ Later, Beza suggests that Chemnitz was responsible for a shift in the views of the Württemberg theologians on this question, such that they affirmed possession while denying inherence.¹⁰⁹ As Beza sees it, construing the genus maiestaticum merely as non-inherent power-possession seems to make it harder to see how God’s presence in Christ differs from his activity in the saints—contrary to Andreae’s intention.¹¹⁰ I noted above Andreae’s rejection of CN-semantics. As he understands this semantics, it involves reading locutions such as ‘God suffered’ as ‘humanity united to divinity suffered’. This way of talking is indeed Beza’s: ‘We interpret this enunciation, by which God is said to have suffered thus: God, that is the flesh united to the divinity, suffered.’¹¹¹ Elsewhere Beza expresses himself in a way more in line with Cyril: ‘God is said to have suffered, not because he received sufferings in himself, but rather κατ᾽ ἄλλο [i.e. according to something else], that is, it must be understood according to the human nature, because it suffered’;¹¹² and slightly less clearly here: ‘ “God is mortal, suffered, was crucified”, and expressions similar to these [are interpreted in this way]: . . . God, that is, the Son of God, sustains in his hypostasis the man, that is the flesh which is mortal, suffered, and was crucified.’¹¹³ Hence: BeN-semantics:

‘God is φp’ =def ‘God sustains a human nature that is Φp’.

(‘BeN’ for ‘Beza’s nature semantics’. BeN-semantics is the instance of CNsemantics relevant to φp predicates; Beza clearly accepts CN-semantics generally.) One aspect of his Christological semantics that Andreae takes Beza to task for is Beza’s claim that predications ‘in natural matter’—such as ‘this man is God’, or ‘God is man’—are in some sense ‘metaphorical’. Beza says the following in a passage part of which I quoted above: Our people do not deny this proposition, ‘Man is God’, but they teach how it must be explained. When it is said ‘This man is God’, we say that it is a figurative expression (tropicam locutionem), which you call an unusual one, since an expression in which disparate things are predicated of each other—for example, ‘God’ [predicated] of ‘man’—is not a usual or regular one, because the one species is not the other. For this reason the word ‘is’ is interpreted by the word

¹⁰⁸ Beza, Resp., 93; see too 116. ¹⁰⁹ See Beza, Resp., 152, 163, 173. ¹¹⁰ See Beza, Resp., 162. ¹¹¹ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 213; Armstrong and Mallinson, 258. ¹¹² Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 240; Armstrong and Mallinson, 288. ¹¹³ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 366; Armstrong and Mallinson, 427–8, altered. Obviously, Beza should not say ‘man’ here, and elsewhere he is more careful, as we have seen.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

254

 

‘assumed’. Whence then also those expressions, ‘God is mortal, suffered, was crucified’, and expressions similar to these [are interpreted in this way], since God, that is, the Son of God, sustains in his hypostasis the man, that is the flesh which is mortal, suffered, and was crucified.¹¹⁴

The examples in the final sentence are, as we have seen, cases of CN-semantics (here using ‘the man’ in the abstract sense of ‘humanity’, as Beza sometimes does).¹¹⁵ But unpacking the earlier part of the passage is rather tricky. What Beza attempts to do is spell out what the relevant predication means given its context. Thus, Beza suggests that we should understand ‘is’ to mean ‘assumed’— I take it, here synonymous with ‘sustains’, as in the final sentence. So this would give us ‘God sustains a human nature’ as among the truth conditions relevant for someone uttering ‘this man is God’ in the Christological context. The contrasting case—a ‘regular or usual’ predication—is one in which ‘the one species is . . . the other’: in the case that Andreae and Beza discuss, ‘a man is an ass’ is false ‘because the species are different’.¹¹⁶ True cases of regular predication conform to Porphyry’s analysis, and either identify the subject’s kind or essence (essential predication, predication ‘in natural matter’: that is to say, predication of genus, difference, or species), or describe the subject in some way (predication of property or accident).¹¹⁷ Both Beza and Andreae agree that the predication ‘God is man’ does not fit either paradigm. Andreae holds that the copula marks out some kind of sameness*; Beza holds that what the predication means in the Christological context is ‘God sustains a human nature’. The passage quoted does not talk about signification. But elsewhere Beza says that ‘in the proposition “Man is God”, “man” does not signify a true man, but the Son of God who sustains a human nature’:¹¹⁸ where ‘signifying a true man’ requires signifying something ‘which consists’ merely ‘of a body and a rational soul’¹¹⁹—that is, an independent human nature or person. What Beza is denying is that the assumed humanity became the same as the divine person— something that Andreae’s view, as I have shown, seems to require. And note here Beza’s statement of his own semantics for predications ‘in natural matter’: BeS-semantics:

‘God is man’ =def ‘God sustains a human nature’.

(‘Man is God’ will have exactly the same semantics.)

¹¹⁴ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 366; Armstrong and Mallinson, 427–8, altered. ¹¹⁵ On this, see n. 87. ¹¹⁶ Andreae, Acta, 364; Armstrong and Mallinson, 426, altered. ¹¹⁷ As Andreae puts it, such a predication is called unusual because ‘it was unknown to Aristotle, and is not subject to the rules of his Organon, or to those of other dialecticians’ (Andreae, Acta, 368; Armstrong and Mallinson, 429, altered); this latter reference, I take it, is to Porphyry. ¹¹⁸ Beza, Resp., 186. ¹¹⁹ I adopt Andreae’s definition of ‘man’ here, to try to bring out Beza’s point.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

       ´

255

So nothing other than terminology turns on the disagreement about ‘unusual’ and ‘figurative’ predication, since both theologians concede that there is a sense in which the predication is true in the Christological context. Beza twice notes that the difference between himself and Andreae on the matter is just terminological:¹²⁰ Beza holds that a predication in accordance with Porphyry’s predicables is proper, and all others metaphorical; Andreae holds that a predication in accordance with Porphyry’s predicables is proper, but that others fall into two groups, unusual (i.e. Christological predications) and metaphorical. The substantive difference between them, as I have tried to show, can be found in their semantics of the term ‘man’. ¹²⁰ Beza apud Andreae, Acta, 366, 368; Armstrong and Mallinson, 427, 429.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

Concluding Remarks

As I have presented the Christology of the Formula of Concord and its aftermath, the positions of Lutheran orthodoxy fall into two camps: broadly speaking Brenzian–Andreaean, and broadly speaking Chemnitzian. Characteristic of the first is the view that the genus maiestaticum constitutes or grounds the hypostatic union, and that divine properties are predicated of the human nature even during Christ’s earthly life, in virtue of (kryptic) power-exercise or power-possession; characteristic of the second is the claim that the supposital union grounds the hypostatic union, and that divine properties are only exceptionally predicated of the human nature during Christ’s earthly life, and this in virtue of their merely episodic exercise. (Omnipresence is a possible exception, as noted in section 6.3.2.) This divergence of views revealed itself forcefully during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, in a debate between the theologians of Tübingen and the theologians of Giessen on the status of the genus maiestaticum during Christ’s earthly life—a debate resolved in favour of Giessen by the Decisio saxonica of 10 December 1623, an assessment that later seventeenth-century Lutherans tended to accept.¹ The broadly Brenzian view, defended by the Tübingen theologians, is that the genus maiestaticum is a necessary, not just a voluntary, consequence of the hypostatic union. The important Tübingen theologian Melchior Nicolai (1578–1659), for example, holds that the hypostatic union is not ‘a relation of the natures between themselves’ but something perichoretic, ‘a real and indistant presence’.² He follows Andreae in supposing the communication of the divine person to the human nature entails ‘the communication of the [divine] nature’ too.³ According to Nicolai, it follows from this that if the person is everywhere then ‘the humanity is everywhere’.⁴ And like the Brenzians, Nicolai refers to the humanity as the ‘assumed man’: given that (paraphrasing Luther) ‘we cannot find even one place where Christ the God is where the assumed man is not’, it again follows that the humanity is everywhere.⁵ The genus maiestaticum is a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union.

¹ Solida verboque dei . . . congrua decisio (Leipzig, 1624). For an excellent and minutely detailed discussion of the whole controversy, see Wiedenroth, Krypsis und Kenosis. ² Nicolai, Consideratio theologica quatuor quaestionum controversarum, q. 1, §6 (Tübingen, 1622), 16. ³ Nicolai, Cons. theol., q. 1, §24 (p. 31). ⁴ Nicolai, Cons. theol., q. 1, §6 (p. 16). ⁵ Nicolai, Cons. theol., q. 1, §§4–5 (p. 15).

Communicatio idiomatum. Richard Cross, Oxford University Press (2019). © Richard Cross 2019. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846970.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

 

257

If the theologians of Tübingen are the evident inheritors of Brenzianism, then the theologians of Giessen are just as much the inheritors of Chemnitz’s approach. Nicolai himself notes Chemnitz’s apparent hesitancy over necessary (as opposed to voluntary) omnipresence.⁶ But the association between at least some of the Giessen theologians, who accepted omnivolipraesentia, and Chemnitz himself lies far more deeply than this. For example, a 1621 disputation by one Henry Piscator (matriculated at the University of Giessen, 1611),⁷ held under the leading Giessen theologian, Balthasar Mentzer (1565–1627), and reprinted by Mentzer as part of his account of the Tübingen–Giessen debate, more or less summarizes salient parts of the 1578 edition of Chemnitz’s De duabus, as Mentzer’s printed marginal annotations show.⁸ And like Chemnitz, the text restricts the genus maiestaticum to Christ’s Exaltation. The issue is whether or not the genus maiestaticum, either in its ontological or linguistic varieties, should be restricted to the Exaltation. The Decisio saxonica constitutes a thoughtful and carefully crafted account of a basically Chemnitzian theory of the genus maiestaticum—albeit that the document does not use that phrase—in terms of power-possession, not just power-exercise, with the additional specification, however, that predication tracks power-exercise, not power-possession. (The marked overall coherence of the text makes it hard to suppose that it had more than one author.)⁹ The Decisio counts as among the communicated properties ‘the ability (potestas) and power (potentia) of ruling (dominandi) omnipresently in heaven and on earth’;¹⁰ and the power to ‘understand everything (omnia sciat), know everything (omnia norit), be able to do everything (omnia possit)’,¹¹ ‘to operate by his [viz. God’s] omnipotence, goodness and justice’,¹² and ‘to exercise divine majesty and power’.¹³ But during Christ’s earthly life these powers of the human nature were not exercised, or at least used only in specific and limited ways (e.g. the exercise of some of them in miraculous activity).¹⁴ Neither, indeed, during his earthly life, did Christ, in virtue of his human nature, possess created supernatural gifts.¹⁵ (So the view is kenotic even in relation to Medieval theologies of kenosis, which allow SG-possession during Christ’s earthly life, though not of course the

⁶ Nicolai, Cons. theol., q. 1, §16 (pp. 23–4). ⁷ See Ernst Klewick and Karl Ebel (eds.), Die Matrikel der Universität Giessen 1608–1707 (Giessen: J. Ricker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1898), 193. ⁸ Mentzer, Necessaria et iusta defensio contra iniustas criminationes (Giessen, 1624). ⁹ In all likelihood Matthias Hoe von Hoenegg (1580–1645) (see Johann Georg Walch, Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religions-Streitigkeiten der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirchen, 5 vols (Jena: Wittwe, 1733–9) IV, 568; I owe this reference to John Aquinas Farren, ‘The Lutheran Krypsis– Kenosis Controversy: The Presence of Christ, 1619–27’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., 1974), 27). ¹⁰ Solida decisio, 33. ¹¹ Solida decisio, 43. ¹² Solida decisio, 52. ¹³ Solida decisio, 56. ¹⁴ See e.g. Solida decisio, 33, 56, 65, 79. ¹⁵ See Solida decisio, 82.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

258

 

possession of divine powers by the human nature.)¹⁶ The mark of the Exaltation is the exercise of these various powers,¹⁷ albeit that this exercise remains hidden to those in the wayfaring state.¹⁸ The contrasting, rejected, view—that of the Tübingen theologians—is that the powers are both possessed and exercised during the earthly life, but in a way that is hidden.¹⁹ The choice between the two views (those of Tübingen and Giessen) is made not on conceptual grounds but fundamentally on the basis of the authority of Scripture,²⁰ of the Apostle’s Creed,²¹ and of the Augsburg Confession and Formula of Concord.²² As the text sees it, the rejected (Tübingen) view in effect allows no space for the Exaltation to add anything to the Incarnation, despite the fact that these events are kept firmly distinct in the authoritative sources.²³ On the view taken by the Decisio saxonica, the exercise of these various powers is a voluntary matter. Both miracle-working and the Exaltation are matters not of necessity but of divine will.²⁴ Thus, the question of omnipresence is raised in the following terms: ‘What is the proper and proximate foundation of the omnipresence of Christ Jesus according to the flesh? Whether the will and good pleasure of God, or the personal union, or the Session at God’s right hand?’²⁵ The answer is that the personal union is the ‘general foundation’²⁶—that is to say, a necessary condition for Christ’s omnipresence according to the flesh; and that the Exaltation is the ‘foundation’ of ‘his attaining the full use of the received majesty’.²⁷ But the Exaltation itself is a matter of will: ‘that he [viz. Christ according to his human nature] attains the gratuitous and free, or heavenly, presence of God . . . to the extent that it is gratuitous and glorious, depends solely on God’s most free, favourable (propitia), and merciful will’.²⁸ There is some initial ambiguity as to whether the possession of the powers, without their exercise, should count as the possession of divine majesty or not. At one point, the text claims that ‘Christ, in the state of humiliation, emptied himself (se evacuaret) with respect to the majesty of omnipotence’.²⁹ But elsewhere the text makes it clear that it is not the majesty itself that is lost, but its use, and it is the lack of the use of the relevant powers that constitutes humiliation: ‘the κένωσις [i.e. kenosis] is not made with respect to the majesty, because Christ did not put it aside, but always retained it even according to the flesh, in unity of person’.³⁰ So since the exercise or use of the powers is not merely hidden, but lacking, the text in these terms expressly affirms a kenotic, and not merely kryptic, account of Christ’s earthly life. Since during his life Christ was not (in virtue of his human nature) ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁹ ²¹ ²⁴ ²⁶ ²⁹ ³⁰

I commented briefly on such theories in section 2.3.2, p. 103. See e.g. Solida decisio, 23, 27–8, 33, 38, 56–7. ¹⁸ See Solida decisio, 87. See e.g. Solida decisio, 46. ²⁰ See e.g. Solida decisio, 27, and the texts cited in n. 23 below. See Solida decisio, 37. ²² See Solida decisio, 27. ²³ See e.g. Solida decisio, 49, 61–2. For miracles, see n. 14 above; for the Exaltation, see below. ²⁵ Solida decisio, 19. Solida decisio, 22. ²⁷ Solida decisio, 23. ²⁸ Solida decisio, 19; see too 25. Solida decisio, 42. Solida decisio, 91; see too, 35, 37, 61 (the last of which I quote in n. 31 below).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

 

259

omnipresent, it follows, pari passu, that none of the omni-attributes can be predicated of his human nature in this state.³¹ Predication is associated, in short, with power-exercise, not possession. And the mark of Christ’s earthly life is power-possession without power-exercise, as for Chemnitz. In short, the text accepts something like the following variant of WGM-semantics: DS-semantics: ‘Christ is φd (according to his human nature h)’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness only if h bears Φd-ness; and h bears Φd-ness iff h is personally united to the divine person. The opposing view is something like this: DS’-semantics: ‘Christ is Φd (according to his human nature h)’ =def ‘h exercises Φd-ness’; and h exercises Φd-ness iff h bears φd-ness; and h bears Φd-ness iff h is personally united to the divine person. These debates, internal to Lutheran orthodoxy, reflect tensions in Brenzian Christology that became very evident in Andreae’s vacillations on the various issues. Indeed, given the outcome of the controversy between the Tübingen and Giessen theologians, it is no surprise to find Francis Turretin (1623–87), author of the most significant Reformed dogmatics of the seventeenth century, Institutio theologicae elencticae (1679–85), reaching back to Maulbronn for a definitive summary of the Lutheran view—it is after all Andreae’s Maulbronn teaching that the Decisio Saxonica in effect affirms—and noting rather wryly that Luther himself adopts the same view of the concrete/abstract contrast as the Reformed theologians do.³² If we look at the classic introductory Lutheran textbook of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Johann Friedrich König’s (1619–64) Theologia positiva acroamatica (1664), written just twenty or so years before Turretin’s Institutio, it is not clear that we find Brenz’s view rather than Chemnitz’s.³³ It is at least

³¹ At one point the text quotes a long passage from Luther, Vom Abendmahl—a passage to which, as we learn, the Tübingen theologians appealed in defence of their view (see Solida decisio, 61)—to show that Luther does not hold Christ to have divine attributes during his earthly life (see Luther, Vom Abendmahl, WA, XXVI, 420.28–422.28; LW, XXXVII, 280–1, quoted in Solida decisio, 58–61). The passage is one in which Luther asserts a version of IBS. The Decisio saxonica comments: ‘Here is treated only about the presence of the Son of Man in heaven, but not about his reign (regimine), and much less about his universal and ceaseless governance’ (Solida decisio, 61). Presumably the authors are not worried about the inconsistency of the passage with their own view, provided it can be shown to be inconsistent with the view of their opponents. ³² Turretin, Institutio theologicae elencticae, p. 2 loc. 13, q. 8, §7 (3 vols (Geneva, 1679–85), II, 350–1; trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, 3 vols (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1994), II, 323). Turretin quotes the opening theses of Luther, Disp. de div., th. 1–4. (WA, XXXIX/2, 93.2–9), where Luther lays out clearly the very claim ascribed to him by Turretin. ³³ On König’s life and works, see Andreas Stegmann, Johann Friedrich König: Seine Theologia positiva acroamatica (1664) im Rahmen des frühneuzeitlichen Theologiestudiums, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 137 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

260

 

arguable that König accepts the supposital-union theory,³⁴ and claims that ‘the [hypostatic] union is not between things that are the same’—it is not that the human nature becomes the same* person as the Word, as in Brenzian accounts, but that there is some relation between the person and the nature: ‘the union is in the class of relations’.³⁵ In line with this, König seems to accept CN-semantics.³⁶ Just as in the Decisio saxonica, these powers—‘glory . . . riches (opulentiae) . . . omnipotence . . . omnisapience . . . omniscience . . . omnipresence . . . adorability’—are during Christ’s earthly life possessed but not used.³⁷ Predication seems to be associated with use: the divine attributes ‘are communicated . . . to common possession, use, and denomination’—they are possessed and exercised by both natures, and when used are predicated of (i.e. denominate) both natures.³⁸ As König puts it, divine majesty is retained, but the ‘glorious divine state’ is not.³⁹ So the various omniattributes cannot be predicated of Christ (in his human nature) during his earthly life, just as in the Decisio saxonica. If this is so, König accepts something like CGM₂semantics for the genus maiestaticum. It is not without irony that the claim that arguably started the whole debate on the genus maiestaticum—that is to say, Luther’s IBS—ends up being sharply modified in seventeenth-century Lutheranism. It is in a way equally curious that the original Brenzian motivation—namely, securing the truth of locutions in which divine properties are predicated of the Son of Man, supposing BGMsemantics, or something like it—is likewise vetoed, principally because the genus maiestaticumB is unnecessary for securing the predication of divine properties of the Son of Man. (Consider the claim in the Decisio saxonica that the use of majestic attributes during Christ’s earthly life simply elides incarnation and exaltation.) Indeed, in the absence of Brenz’s metaphysical need for the genus maiestaticum it is no wonder that theologians from Wigand and Chemnitz onwards saw the point of contention between themselves and the Reformed theologians as wholly a matter of Scriptural interpretation, nothing intrinsically to do with the metaphysics of the hypostatic union at all. Perhaps even more remarkable is the way in which what started in the late 1520s as a thesis about the nature of the Incarnation ended up, a hundred years later, as a theory about the nature of the Exaltation—namely, that Christ’s Exaltation consists in the conferral of certain divine attributes on his human nature. Still, while these outcomes are in a way odd, at least the first two of them (the hesitations about IBS and BGM-semantics and its variants) strike me as

³⁴ König, Theologia positiva acroamatica, p. 3, §91 (ed. Andreas Stegmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 196). ³⁵ König, Theol., p. 3, §99 (p. 198). ³⁶ I do not have space to argue for this claim, but some evidence for it can be found in König, Theol., p. 3, §§127, 139, 142, 148, 150–3, 156, 160 (pp. 204, 208, 210, 212, 214). ³⁷ König, Theol., p. 3, §281 (p. 246). ³⁸ König, Theol., p. 3, §168 (p. 218). ³⁹ König, Theol., p. 3, §280 (p. 245).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

 

261

theologically desirable, since as Beza and the Wittenberg theologians spotted, Brenz’s semantics are inconsistent with Chalcedon, and since, as Hesshus pointed out, IBS yields a spatial presence far too extensive for the Eucharistic purposes that catalysed it in the first place. No one who wants to be consistent with Chalcedon— even Brenz himself—should accept Brenz’s Christology, for reasons that by now should be abundantly apparent. What does seem to have made its way from these sixteenth-century discussions into the later Lutheran tradition, as Karl Barth observed, is an emphasis on the mutual communion of the natures—something that features conspicuously in the Formula of Concord, though with rather different senses in the Epitome and the Solida declaratio, as I have argued.⁴⁰ It would be worthwhile exploring possible different senses of this term in the seventeenth-century discussions, comparable to the different senses I have outlined in the earlier discussions. I assume that communion becomes a perichoretic notion, related to Nicholai’s indistant presence of the natures to each other. These seventeenth-century moves do not take us much beyond the technical issues raised in the Christology of the previous century. And while much effort was expended on these issues (in particular by Chemnitz himself ), difficulties that strike me as more fundamental, and more intractable, were ignored: problems common both to Chemnitz and his Brenzian opponents. For example, apart from Heshuss, there was little attempt to address the fundamental difficulty in the genus maiestaticum—namely, the Augustinian problem that I highlighted in the Introduction. And Heshuss’s efforts were admittedly rather schematic. Neither was any progress made on the question of the nature of dispositional properties, and whether activity requires the presence of such properties or not—something that underlies some worries we might have about Andreae’s contribution to the debate. Again, the theologians do not seem to have been concerned with theoretical or philosophical worries that their accounts may raise—even though making much sense of their claims would require close attention to these kinds of concerns. Equally, beyond Chemnitz’s claim that a divine power can be possessed without inherence—in turn based on the examples of such possession that Schegk highlighted—no progress was made in working out what such possession might amount to. Thus, apart from the claim that the relevant communication is real, there is no account at all of what real communication itself consists in. These theoretical lacunae are made all the more striking if we recall that there are well-developed theories of participation in Medieval theology, both Eastern and Western, albeit that the accounts are very different from each other. For the Eastern theologians the Augustinian problem does not arise, since these theologians do not accept a strong account of divine simplicity, and by and large think of ⁴⁰ See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958), 52.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi

262

 

divine activities as uncreated features of God distinct from the divine essence.⁴¹ Admittedly, while this kind of account deals with the Augustinian problem, I know of no sustained attempt among the Eastern theologians to give a developed theory of the nature of the ontological relation between the divine activities and the creatures that participate in them. For the Western theologians, participation is a matter of the possession of created gifts,⁴² and the divine activities are mere extrinsic denominations, such that it is virtue of features of the created world (i.e. its dependent existence and essences) that we ascribe (e.g.) creative activity to God.⁴³ Neither view is consistent with Lutheran ones. It seems that the Lutheran theologians are caught between the Scylla of not wanting to distinguish the activities from the essence, and the Charybdis of not wanting to treat the activities as mere extrinsic denominations. Whether or not Lutheran Christology of the majestic kind has anything to add to these opposing Medieval accounts thus remains to me a matter for doubt. And sometimes the line between mystery and incoherence is very fine; a little more theory from the Chemnitzian theologians would perhaps help determine on which side of that fine line they lie. ⁴¹ For a philosophically sensitive, if (for that very reason) not uncontroversial, reading of the topic in Eastern theology from Basil to Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), see Torstein Theodor Tollefsen, Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ⁴² On this, see e.g. my ‘Deification in Aquinas’. ⁴³ For one way of spelling this out see e.g. Aquinas, ST, q. 45, a. 3 c and ad 1: ‘Creation in the creature is nothing other than a certain relation to the creator. . . . Creation signified actively signifies a divine action, which is [God’s] essence along with a relation to the creature. But a relation in God, to a creature, is not real but merely rational, whereas the relation of a creature to God is a real relation.’ Claiming that the relation in God is ‘not real but merely rational’ is a way of claiming that it is a merely extrinsic denomination, something inherent not in God but merely in the creature.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

Tables Table 1. UC-ordering Soul–body model¹ Supposital union Brenz (1528–61) Brenz (from 1562) Andreae (1560s) Andreae (Formula of Concord, Montbéliard) Wigand Chemnitz (1570) Chemnitz (1578)

Hypostatic union + hypostasis-as-subject Supposital union ! (hypostatic union + hypostasisas-subject) Sameness* of person ! (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticumB) (Genus maiestaticumB = sameness* of person) ! hypostasis-as-subject (Genus maiestaticumB = sameness* of person) ! hypostasis-as-subject Sameness* of person ! (hypostasis-as-subject + genus maiestaticumB) (Supposital union ! (hypostatic union + hypostasisas-subject) ! genus maiestaticum) (Supposital union ! hypostatic union ! hypostasisas-subject) + genus maiestaticum Supposital union ! hypostatic union ! (hypostasisas-subject + genus maiestaticum)

¹ Or any other theory that makes the hypostatic union basic.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

264



Table 2. The genus maiestaticum (omnipotence and omniscience) during Christ’s earthly life²

Luther⁴ Brenz (to 1527) Brenz (from 1528) Hesshus Andreae (Disp. de mai.; Assertio) Andreae (Maulbronn) Andreae (Formula of Concord) Andreae (Montbéliard) Wigand Chemnitz (1570) Chemnitz et al. (Formula of Concord) Chemnitz (1578) Decisio saxonica (rejected view) Decisio saxonica (accepted view)

Powerpossession

Nonepisodic powerexercise or activity

Nonepisodic true propertypredication

Semantics of the genus maiestaticum

Krypsis³

0 0 1n 0 0

0 0 1n 0 1n

0 0 1n 0 1n

n/a n/a BGM/BGM* HGM AGM₁

n/a⁵ n/a 1 0 1

1n

0

0

AGM₂

1

1n

0

0

AGM₂

1

1n

0

1n

BGM

1

1n 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0

WGM CGM₁ CGM₁

1 0 1

1 ?

0 1n

0 1n

CGM₂ DS’

1 1

1

0

0

DS

0

² ‘1n’ should be taken as signalling that the relevant feature is a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union. ³ A value of ‘0’ in this column amounts to an explicitly kenotic rather than kryptic account of Christ’s earthly life. The table shows clearly that ‘krypsis’ meant different things to different theologians—and hence that ‘kenosis’ did too. ⁴ The values in this row would also represent the views of all Patristic, Medieval, and Reformed theologians known to me. Note that it was admitted by all the thinkers in this table except Luther and perhaps the early Brenz that the human nature possessed these divine attributes at the Exaltation. The values for all columns according to Catholic and Reformed thinkers would of course be ‘0’; neither would they admit any such attributes at the Exaltation. ⁵ ‘n/a’ because the question of the possession and/or exercise of divine attributes does not arise; hence neither does the question of the hiddenness of such attributes.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi



265

Table 3. Bodily omnipresence

Luther (to 1527) Luther (from 1528) Brenz (to 1527) Brenz (from 1528) Westphal Heshuss Andreae (Disp. de mai.; Assertio) Andreae (Maulbronn) Andreae (Formula of Concord) Andreae (Montbéliard) Wigand Chemnitz (1570) Chemnitz et al. (Formula of Concord) Chemnitz (1578) Decisio saxonica (rejected view) Decisio saxonica (accepted view)

During Christ’s earthly life

At the Exaltation

0 1n 0 1n 0 0 1n 0 1? 1n 0 0 0 0 1n 0

1 1n 1 1n 1 0 1n 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1n 1

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

Bibliography Primary Sources Andreae, Jakob, Disputatio de maiestate hominis Christi (Tübingen, 1564). Andreae, Jakob, Assertio piae et orthodoxae doctrinae de personali unione (Tübingen, 1565). Andreae, Jakob, Disputatio de duabus naturis in Christo (Tübingen, 1569). Andreae, Jakob, Sechs Christliche Predig (Tübingen, 1573); ET Robert Kolb, Andreae and the Formula of Concord: Six Sermons on the Way to Lutheran Unity (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1977). Andreae, Jakob, Acta Colloquii Monte Beligardensis (Tübingen, 1587); ET Lutheranism vs. Calvinism: The Classic Debate at the Colloquy of Montbéliard, trans. Clinton J. Armstrong, ed. Jeffrey Mallinson (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 2017). Andreae, Jakob, Epitome colloquii Montisbelgartensis (Tübingen, 1588). Aquinas, Thomas, Opera omnia, ed. Robert Busa, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/ iopera.html. Aristotle, Opera omnia, ed. Immanuel Bekker, 5 vols (Berlin: Reimer, 1831). Athanasius, Opera omnia, 4 vols, PG, 25–8 (Paris: Garnier, 1884–7). Athanasius, Sur l’incarnation du Verbe, ed. Charles Kannengeisser, Sources Chrétiennes, 199 (Paris: Cerf, 1973). Athanasius, Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978). Augustine, Opera omnia, 16 vols, PL, 32–8, 40–8 (Paris: Migne, 1841–77). Augustine, Epistulae. Pars 4, ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL, 57 (Vienna and Leipzig: F. Tempsky, 1896). Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione, ed. C. F. Vrba and I. Zycha, CSEL, 60 (Vienna: Tempsky; Leipzig: Freytag, 1913). Augustine, De trinitate, ed. W. Mountain, 2 vols, CCSL, 50 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968). Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus Octoginta tribus, ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CCSL, 44A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975). Basil of Caesarea, Lettres, ed. Yves Courtonne, 3 vols, Collection des universités de France (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1957–66). Basil of Caesarea, Contra Eunomium, ed. Bernard Sesboüé and others, Sources chrétiennes, 299 (Paris: Cerf, 1982). Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, ed. J. Leclerq and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77). Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche hersausgegeben im Gendenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930, 12th edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998); ET The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000). Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, new edition, ed. Irene Dingel and others (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

268



Beza, Theodore, Ad Domini Joannis Brentii argumenta . . . placidum et modestum responsio (Geneva, 1565). Beza, Theodore, Tractatus tres de rebus gravissimis scripti (Geneva, 1565). Beza, Theodore, Ad acta colloquii Montisbelgardensis Tubingae edita . . . responsio (Geneva, 1587). Biel, Gabriel, Collectorium circa quatuor libros sententiarum, ed. W. Werbeck and U. Hofmann, 5 vols (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973–92). Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, ed. C. Moreschini, Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000). Brenz, Johannes, In divi Ioannis evangelion . . . exegesis, [1st edition] (Hagenau, 1527). Brenz, Johannes, In divi Ioannis evangelion . . . exegesis, [2nd edition] (Hagenau, 1529). Brenz, Johannes, Brenz, Von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des Altares: Drey Predig (Frankfurt, 1556). Brenz, Johannes, Recognitio propheticae et apostolicae doctrinae de vera maiestate Domini nostri Jesu Christi, de dextera Dei Patri omnipotentis (Tübingen, 1564). Brenz, Johannes, In Evangelion quod inscribitur secundum Lucam, duodecim priora capita homiliae, in Johannes Brenz, Opera omnia, V (Tübingen, 1582). Brenz, Johannes, Anecdota Brentiana: ungedruckte Briefe und Bedenken, ed. T. Pressel (Tübingen: J. J. Heckenhauer, 1868). Brenz, Johannes, Die christologischen Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Theodor Mahlmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981). Bucer, Martin, Deutsche Schriften, ed. Robert Stupperich and others, 17 vols (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1960–2013). Bugenhagen, Johannes, Acta der Disputatio zu Flensburg die sache des Hochwirdigen Sacraments betreffend (Wittenberg, 1529); ET in Johannes Bugenhagen, Selected Writings, 2 vols, trans. Kurt K. Hendel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015). Bullinger, Heinrich, Apologetica expositio (Zurich, 1556). Bullinger, Heinrich, Repetitio et dilucidior explicatio consensus veteris orthodoxae catholicaeque Christi Ecclesiae (Zurich, 1564). Buys, Jan, De persona Christi disputatio theologica contra ubiquitarios (Mainz, 1583). Calvin, John, Tracts, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844–9). Calvin, John, Opera omnia, 57 vols, CR, 29–87 (Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1863–1900). Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1950). Calvin, John, Theological Treatises, ed. J. K. S. Reid, LCC, 22 (London: SCM Press, 1954). Calvin, John, Opera selecta, ed. P. Barth and G. Niesel, 3rd edition, 5 vols (Munich: Kaiser, 1963–74). Chemnitz, Martin, De duabus naturis in Christo, [1st edition] (Jena, 1570). Chemnitz, Martin, De duabus naturis in Christo, 2nd edition (Leipzig, 1580); trans. J. A. O. Preus (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1971). Chemnitz, Martin, Timotheus Kirchner, and Nickolaus Selnecker, Apologia Oder Verantwortung des Christlichen Concordien Buchs (Dresden, 1584). Concordia triglotta (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921). Consensus Tigurinus: Die Einigung zwischen Heinrich Bullinger und Johannes Calvin über das Abendmahl, ed. Emidio Campi and Ruedi Reich (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2009). Cyril of Alexandria, In D. Joannis Evangelium, ed. P. E. Pusey, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi



269

Cyril of Alexandria, Select Letters, ed. and trans. Lionel R. Wickham, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Dignel, Irene, ed., Die Debatte um die Wittenberger Abendmahlslehre und Christologie (1570–1574), Controversia et Confessio, 8 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). Duns Scotus, Opera omnia, ed. L. Wadding, 12 vols (Lyons, 1639). Duns Scotus, Opera omnia, ed. C. Balić and others, 21 vols (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 1950–2013). Durand of St Pourçain, In sententias theologicas commentariorum libri IIII, 2 vols (Venice, 1571). Gerhard, Johann, Loci theologici, ed. I. F. Cotta (Tübingen, 1762). Gerlach, Stephan, Assertio piae sanaque doctrinae de divina maiestate Christi hominis (Tübingen, 1585). Gregory of Nazianzus, Lettres théologiques, ed. Paul Gallay and others, Sources chrétiennes, 208 (Paris: Cerf, 1974); ET On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, ed. and trans. Lionel Wickham, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). Hesshus, Tilman, De praesentia corporis Christi in coena Domini (Jena, 1560). Hesshus, Tilman, De duabus in Christo naturis (Magdeburg, 1590). Holcot, Robert, Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God, ed. Hester Goodenough Gelber, Studies and Texts, 62 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983). Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, ed. Rainer Berndt, Corpus Victorinum, Textus historici, 1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2008). Jerome, Adversus Vigilantium, ed. J.-L. Freiertag, CCSL, 89C (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). John of Damascus, Writings, The Fathers of the Church, trans. Frederic H. Chase (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1958). John of Damascus, Expositio fidei, ed. B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos: II. Expositio fidei, Patristische Texte und Studien, 12 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1973). König, Johann, Theologia positiva acroamatica, ed. Andreas Stegmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, VI/4, pt. C (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999). Lombard, Peter, Sententiae, 2 vols, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, 4 (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1971–81). Luther, Martin, Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, 73 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2009). Luther, Martin, Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden, 6 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1912–21). Luther, Martin, Briefwechsel: kritische Gesamtausgabe, 18 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1930–2002). Luther, Martin, Works, 55 vols (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–86). Luther, Martin, Studienausgabe, ed. Hans-Ulrich Delius, 5 vols (Berlin: Evangelische Verlangsanstalt, 1979–92). Luther, Martin, Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 6, trans. John Nicholas Lenker and others (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, n.d.). Luther, Martin, Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi, trans. Christopher B. Brown http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/luther-divinity.txt; also in Mitchell Tolpingrud, ‘Luther’s Disputation Concerning the Divinity and Humanity of Christ’, Lutheran Quarterly, 10 (1996), 151–78.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

270



Melanchthon, Philip, Opera omnia, 28 vols, CR, 1–28 (Halle and Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1834–60). Melanchthon, Philip, Werke in Auswahl, ed. Robert Stupperich, 7 vols (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1951–75). Melanchthon, Philip, Briefwechsel: Kritische und kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. Heinz Scheible and others (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991–). Mentzer, Balthasar, Necessaria et iusta defensio contra iniustas criminationes (Giessen, 1624). Mörlin, Joachim, Disputatio de communicatione idiomatum (n. pl., 1571). Natalis, Hervaeus, In quatuor libros sententiarum commentaria (Paris, 1647). Nemesius of Emesa, De natura hominis, ed. Moreno Morani, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987); ET in William Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa, Library of Christian Classics (London: SCM Press, 1955). Nicolai, Melchior, Consideratio theologica quatuor quaestionum controversarum (Tübingen, 1622). Origen, De principiis, ed. and trans. John Behr, 2 vols, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Osiander, Andreas, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebass, 10 vols (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1975–97). Plutarch, Moralia, ed. G. N. Bernardakis, 7 vols (Leipzig, 1888–96). Porphyry, Isagoge, ed. A. Busse, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV/1 (Berlin, Reimer, 1887). Richard of St Victor, De trinitate, ed. Jean Ribaillier, Textes Philosophiques du Moyen Age, 6 (Paris: Vrin, 1958). Schegk, Jacob, De una persona et duabus naturis Christi (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1565). Schwenckfeld, Caspar, Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum, 19 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel 1907–61). Selnecker, Nikolaus, Repetitio doctrinae de idiomatum communicatione (Leipzig, 1581). Solida verboque dei . . . congrua decisio (Leipzig, 1624). Tanner, Norman (ed.), The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990). Timann, Johannes, Farrago sententiarum consententium in vera et catholica doctrina de Coena Domini (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1555). Turretin, Francis, Institutio theologicae elencticae, 3 vols (Geneva, 1679–85); trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, 3 vols (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R publishing, 1994). Vermigli, Peter Martyr, Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura (Zurich, 1561), trans. John Patrick Donnelly, Peter Martyr Library, series 1, vol. 2 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1995). Warhafftiger unnd grundtlicher Bericht von dem Gesprech zwischen des Churfürsten Pfalzgrauen und des Hertzogen zů Würrtemberg Theologen von des Herren Nachtmal zů Maulbronn gehalten (n. pl., 1564). Westphal, Joachim, Farrago confusanearum et inter se dissidentium opinionum de Coena Domini (Magdeburg, 1552). Westphal, Joachim, Adversus cuiusdam sacramentarii falsam criminationem (Frankfurtam-Main, 1555). Westphal, Joachim, Apologia confessionis de coena Domini (Ursel, 1558). Westphal, Joachim, De coena domini confessio (Ursel, 1558).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi



271

Wigand, Johann, De communicatione idiomatum (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1569). William of Ockham, Opera theologica, ed. I. Lalor and others, 10 vols (St Bonaventure, NY: St Bonaventure University Press, 1967–86). William of Ockham, Opera philosophica, ed. I. Lalor and others, 7 vols (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1974–88). Zwingli, Huldrych, Opera omnia, CR, 88– (Berlin: Schwetschke, 1905–); partial ET in G. W. Bromiley (ed.), Zwingli and Bullinger, Library of Christian Classics, 24 (London: SCM Press, 1953).

Secondary Sources Adams, Marilyn McCord, William Ockham, 2 vols, Publications in Medieval Studies, 26 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). Adams, Marilyn McCord, ‘Eucharistic Presence: Some Scholastic Background to Luther’s Debate with Zwingli’, in Christine Helmer (ed.), The Medieval Luther, Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). Arand, Charles P., Robert Kolb, and James A. Nestigen, The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012). Bäck, Allan, On Reduplication: Logical Theories of Quantification, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 49 (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1996). Bąk, F., ‘Scoti schola numerosior est omnibus aliis simul sumptis’, Franciscan Studies, 16 (1956), 144–65. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics. IV/2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958). Baur, Jörg, Einsicht und Glaube: Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978). Baur, Jörg, Luther und seine klassischen Erben: Theologische Aufsätze und Forschungen (Tübingen, Mohr, 1993). Baur, Jörg, ‘Ubiquität’, in Bayer and Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura, 186–301. Bayer, ‘Das Wort ward Fleisch: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation’, in Bayer and Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura, 5–34. Bayer, Oswald, and Benjamin Gleede, eds., Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunication, Theologische Bibliothek Töpemann, 138 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007). Behr, John, The Nicene Faith. Part 1: True God of True God (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Press, 2004). Bente, F., Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1965). Bizer, Ernst, Studien zur Geschichte des Abendmahlsstreits im 16. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962). Bolliger, Daniel, Infiniti contemplatio: Grundzüge der Scotus- und Scotismusrezeption im Werk Huldrych Zwinglis, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 107 (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2003). Brandy, Hans Christian, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 93 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991). Brandy, Hans Christian, ‘Brenz’ Christologie und ihre von Jakob Andreae vertretene Form: Das Maulbronner Kolloquium 1564’, Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte, 100 (2000), 58–84. Chadwick, Henry, ‘Ego Berengarius’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 40 (1989), 415–45.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

272



Cross, Richard, ‘Alloiosis in the Christology of Zwingli’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 46 (1995), 105–22. Cross, Richard, ‘Perichoresis, Deification, and Christological Predication in John of Damascus’, Mediaeval Studies, 62 (2000), 69–124. Cross, Richard, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Cross, Richard, ‘On the Polity of God: The Ecclesiology of Duns Scotus’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 7 (2007), 29–45. Cross, Richard, ‘Homo assumptus and the Christology of Hugh of St Victor: Some Historical and Theological Revisions’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 65 (2014), 62–77. Cross, Richard, ‘Duns Scotus on God’s Essence and Attributes: Metaphysics, Semantics, and the Greek Patristic Tradition’, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales, 83 (2016), 353–83. Cross, Richard, ‘Aquinas on Deification: Created or Uncreated?’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 69 (2018), 106–32. De Greef, Wulfert, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide, expanded edition, trans. Lyle D. Bierma (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). de Libera, Alain, ‘Les actions appartiennent aux sujects: petite archéologie d’un principe leibnizien’, in Stefano Caroti and others (eds.), ‘Ad ingenii acuitionem’: Studies in Honour of Alfonso Maierù, Textes et études du Moyen Âge, 38 (Louvain-la-Neuve: FIDEM, 2006), 199–219. Dieter, Theodor, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Theologie und Philosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001). Dingel, Irene, Concordia controversa: Die öffentlichen Diskussionen um das lutherische Konkordienwerk am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 93 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996). Dingel, Irene, and others (eds.), Philip Melanchthon: Theologian in Classroom, Confession, and Controversy, REFO 500 Academic Studies, 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). Donnelly, John Patrick, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 18 (Leiden: Brill, 1976). Dorner, I. A., History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, Division second, vol. 2, trans. D. W. Simon (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1882). Farren, John Aquinas, ‘The Lutheran Krypsis–Kenosis Controversy: The Presence of Christ, 1619–27’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., 1974. Gaetano, Matthew T., ‘Renaissance Thomism at the University of Padua, 1465–1583’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013. Gelber, Hester, ‘Ockham’s Early Influence: A Question about Foreknowledge and Predestination by Arnold of Strelley, O.P.’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, 55 (1988), 255–89. Gunnoe, Charles D., Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation, Brill’s Series in Church History, 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Haga, Joar, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics? The Interpretation of Communicatio Idiomatum in Early Modern Lutheranism, REFO500 Academic Studies, 2 (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). Hägglund, Bengt, Theologie und Philosophie bei Luther und in der occamistischen Tradition: Luthers Stellung zu der Theorie von der doppelten Wahrheit (Lund: Gleerup, 1955).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi



273

Hallamaa, Olli, ‘Defending Common Rationality: Roger Roseth on Trinitarian Paralogisms’, Vivarium, 41 (2003), 84–119. Hilgenfeld, Hartmut, Mittelalterliche-traditionelle Elemente in Luthers Abendmahlschriften, Studien zur Dogmengeschichte und systematischen Theologie, 29 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1971). Hofer, Andrew, Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus, Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Hund, Johannes, Das Wort ward Fleisch: Eine systematisch-theologische Untersuchung zur Debatte um die Wittenberger Christologie und Abendmahlslehre in den Jahren 1567 bis 1574, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, 114 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). Janse, Wim, Albert Hardenberg als Theologe: Profil eines Bucer-Schülers, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 57 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994). Janse, Wim, ‘Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations’, in Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.), Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, Reformed Historical Theology, 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 37–69. Jensen, Gordon A., The Wittenberg Concord: Creating the Space for Dialogue, Lutheran Quarterly (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2018). Klewick, Ernst, and Karl Ebel (eds.), Die Matrikel der Universität Giessen 1608–1707 (Giessen: J. Ricker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1898). Klinge, Hendrick, ‘Jacob Schegks “De una persona” (1565) und der Mythos der frühen lutherischen Christologie’, in Peter Opitz (ed.), The Myth of the Reformation, Refo500, 9 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 233–47. Klinge, Hendrik, Verheißene Gegenwart: Die Christologie des Martin Chemnitz, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, 152 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). Knudsen, Christian, ‘Intentions and Impositions’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 479–95. Knuuttila, Simo, ‘Philosophy and Theology in Seventeenth-Century Lutheranism’, in Simo Knuuttila and Risto Saarinen (eds.), Theology and Philosophy in Early Modern Philosophy (1550–1750), Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Series Humaniora, 360 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2010), 41–54. Knuuttila, Simo, ‘Supposition and Predication in Medieval Trinitarian Logic’, Vivarium, 21 (2013), 260–74. Köhler, Walther, Zwingli und Luther: Ihr Streit über das Abendmahl nach seinen politischen und religiösen Beziehungen, 2 vols, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 6–7 (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1924–53; reprinted 2017). Kolb, Robert, ‘Melanchthon’s Last Will and Testament: The Responsiones ad articulos Bavaricae inquisitionis as His Final Confession of Faith’, in Dingel and others (eds.), Philip Melanchthon, 141–60. Krüger, Thilo, Empfangene Allmacht: Die Christologie Tilemann Heshusens (1527–1588), Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, 87 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). Lienhard, Marc, Luther: Witness to Jesus Christ: Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982). Lindholm, Stefan, Jerome Zanchi (1516–90) and the Analysis of Reformed Scholastic Christology, Reformed Historical Theology, 37 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

274



Luy, David J., Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014). McKee, Elsie Anne, ‘A Lay Voice in Sixteenth-Century “Ecumenics”: Katharina Schütz Zell in Dialogue with Johannes Brenz, Conrad Pellican, and Caspar Schwenckfeld’, in Mack P. Holt (ed.), Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe: Essays in Honour of Brian G. Armstrong (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 81–110. McLaughlin, R. Emmet, Caspar Schwenckfeld: Reluctant Radical. His Life to 1540, Yale Historical Publications Miscellany, 134 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Mager, Inge, Die Konkordienformel im Fürstentum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Studien zur Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens, 33 (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). Mahlmann, Theodor, Das neue Dogma der lutherischen Christologie: Problem und Geschichte seiner Begründung (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1969). Mahlmann, Theodor, ‘Personeinheit Jesu mit Gott: Interpretation der Zweinaturenlehre in den christologischen Schriften des alten Brenz’, Blätter für württemburgische Kirchengeschichte, 70 (1970), 176–265. Maier, Paul L., Caspar Schwenckfeld on the Person and Work of Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004). Maron, Gottfried, Individualismus und Gemeinschaft bei Caspar von Schwenckfeld: Seine theologie, dargestellt mit besonderer Ausrichtung auf seinen Kirchenbegriff, Beiheft zum Jahrbuch ‘Kirche im Osten’, 2 (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1961). Muller, Richard A., Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003). Ngien, Dennis, ‘Chalcedonian Christology and Beyond: Luther’s Understanding of the Communicatio Idiomatum’, Heythrop Journal, 43 (2004), 54–68. Nieden, Marcel, Organum deitatis: De Christologie des Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Thought, 62 (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1997). Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Jesus: God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe, 2nd edition (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1977). Pawl, Timothy, In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Pawl, Timothy, ‘Explosive Theology: A Reply to Jc Beall’s “Christ—A Contradiction” ’, Journal of Analytic Theology, forthcoming. Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Heresy, Truth, and Mind’, Faith and Philosophy, 16 (1999), 182–93. Preus, J. A. O., The Second Martin: The Life and Theology of Martin Chemnitz (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1994). Raitt, Jill, The Colloquy of Montbéliard: Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ritter, Gerhard, Die heidelberger Universität im Mittelalter (1386–1508): Ein Stück deutscher Geschichte (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1936). Sasse, Hermann, This Is My Body (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1959). Schmid, Heinrich, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. Charles A. Hay and Henry E. Jacobs, 4th ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Lutheran Publication Company, 1899). Schaff, Philip, Christ and Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004). Schmidt, Axel, Die Christologie in Martin Luthers späten Disputationen (St Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1990). Schröder, Richard, Johann Gerhards lutherische Christologie und die aristotelische Metaphysik, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 67 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi



275

Schwarz, Reinhard, ‘Gott ist Mensch: Zur Lehre von der Person Christi bei den Ockhamisten und bei Luther’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 63 (1966), 289–351. Siddals, Ruth M., Logic and Christology in Cyril of Alexandria’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 38 (1987), 341–67. Sparn, Walter, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen theologie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, Calwer Theologische Monographien, 4 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1976). Stegmann, Andreas, Johann Friedrich König: Seine Theologia positiva acroamatica (1664) im Rahmen des frühneuzeitlichen Theologiestudiums, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 137 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). Steinmetz, David C., Calvin in Context (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Streiff, Stefan, ‘Novis linguis loqui’: Martin Luthers Disputation über Joh 1,14 ‘verbum caro factum est’ aus dem Jahr 1539, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, 70 (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). Strzelczyk, Grzegorz, Communicatio idiomatum: Lo scambio delle proprietà. Storia, status quaestionis e prospettive, Tesi Gregoriana, Serie Theologia, 105 (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2004). Sturm, Erdmann K., Der junge Zacharias Ursin: Sein Weg vom Philippismus zum Calvinismus (1534–1562), Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche, 33 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1972). Teigen, Bjarne Wollan, The Lord’s Supper in the Theology of Martin Chemnitz (Brewster, MA: Trinity Lutheran Press, 1986). Tollefsen, Torstein Theodor, Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Vind, Anna, ‘ “Christus factus est peccatum metaphorice”: Über die theologicsche Verwendung rhetorischer Figuren bei Luther unter Einbeziehung Quintilians’, in Bayer and Gleede (eds.), Creator est Creatura, 95–124. Walch, Johann Georg, Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religions-Streitigkeiten der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirchen, 5 vols. (Jena: Wittwe, 1733–9). Washburn, Christian David, ‘St Robert Cardinal Bellarmino’s Defense of Catholic Christology against the Lutheran Doctrine of Ubiquity’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Catholic University of America, 2004. Wengert, Timothy J., Defending Faith: Lutheran Responses to Andreas Osiander’s Doctrine of Justification, 1551–1559 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). Wengert, Timothy J., ‘Philip Melanchthon’s 1557 Lecture on Colossians 3:1–2: Christology as Context for the Controversy over the Lord’s Supper’, in Dingel and others (eds.), Philip Melanchthon, 209–35. White, Graham, Luther as Nominalist: A Study of the Logical Methods used in Martin Luther’s Disputations in the Light of their Medieval Background, Schriften der LutherAgricola-Gesellschaft, 30 (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Society, 1994). Wiedenroth, Ulrich, Krypsis und Kenosis: Studien zu Thema und Genese der Tübinger Christologie im 17. Jahrhundert, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 162 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). Willis, E. David, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1966).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

Index abstract terms, see concrete–abstract distinction; predication in abstracto accident terms, supposition of ac. to Luther 54–5 ac. to Ockham 55 see too supposition action at a distance rejected by Andreae 161 ac. to Calvin 121, 137–9 ac. to Hesshus 137, 140 ac. to Lasco 105–6 rejected by Westphal 139 actiones sunt suppositorum ac. to Aquinas 26, 77n.136 in Luther 77–8 activity, theandric 22–3 ac. to Beza 247 ac. to Wigand 176 see too genus apotelesmaticum AGM₁-semantics 162 AGM₂-semantics 164 alloiosis in Bullinger 108–9 defined 73–4 rejected by Luther 77–8, 80–1 two varieties of 74–6, 80–1 in Wigand 173–4 ac. to Zwingli 71–5 see too communicatio idiomatum; predication, figurative Andreae, Jakob on adorability of Christ’s human nature 237–8 on asymmetry of communicatio idiomatum 240–2 on Augustinian problem 161, 238–9 accepts BMP 242 accepts BH-semantics 237 on Christ’s earthly life 161–5, 240 rejects CN-semantics 234–7 on communicatio idiomatum as distinctive of hypostatic union 233 on communication of divine nature 232 on communication of subsistence 231–4 on created gifts of Christ’s human nature 237–8 on fire–iron analogy 240 on first act–second act distinction 163–4

on genus maiestaticum 25–6, 159–65, 239–40 on hypostatic union 158–9 on instrumentality of Christ’s human nature 160 intellectual inadequacy of 226–7, 252 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 237–8 on Nestorianism 249 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 165, 237–8, 242–3 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 162, 165, 237–8, 243–4 on omniscience of Christ’s human nature 237–8 on praedicatio inusitata 228–9, 230n.11, 254–5 on predication ‘in natural matter’ 227–31, 234–5 on real vs. verbal predication 235–6 on signification of ‘man’ 227–31, 234–5 on soul–body analogy 160, 240, 246–7 rejects supposital union 158–9, 233–4, 244–5 on union of natures 232 see too Formula of Concord, Epitome; Württemberger Bekenntnis anhypostasia–enhypostasia distinction 11n.31 Aquinas, Thomas on accidental union and the Incarnation 54n.55 on actiones sunt suppositorum 77n.136 on Christ’s earthly life 103 on Christ’s omnipresence 106n.69 on communion in existence 231n.17 on divine activity 261–2 on God’s relation to world 261–2 on habitus theory 41 on instrumentality of Christ’s human nature 160n.109 on kenosis 103 on omnipresence of God 115 on power of Christ’s human nature 61 on predication and property bearing 26 on signification of ‘man’ 28–9 rejects subsistence of nature 10–11 on supposition of ‘man’ 29 on theoretical error 97n.47

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

278



Aristotle categories in 2 on substance 1–2 on mind and thought 168n.6 predicables in 9n.23 on predication vs. bearing 26 Arnold of Strelley on bodily omnipresence 64 Athanasius on Christological semantics 13–14 on instrumentality of Christ’s human nature 160n.109 and soul–body analogy 13–14 Augustine on divine simplicity 15 on location of Christ’s body 132 on signification of ‘man’ 96 Augustinian problem in Andreae 161, 238–9 in Chemnitz 223–4 in Hesshus 223n.168 in Kirchner 224n.169 see too simplicity, divine Barth, Karl 261 Basil of Caesarea on divine simplicity 223n.168 on the Trinity 5 Baur, Jörg 66n.95 Behr, John 18 Bellarmine, Robert 31 BeN-semantics 253 Berengar of Tours 69n.106 BeS-semantics 254 BGM-semantics 99 accepted in Formula of Concord, Epitome 202 BH-semantics 100 accepted by Andreae 237 accepted in Formula of Concord, Epitome 202 Bernard of Clarivaux 42n.12 Beza, Theodore accepts BeN-semantics 253 accepts BeS-semantics 254 accepts CN-semantics 157 on communicatio idiomatum as figurative 253–5 on communication of subsistence 231 on concrete–abstract distinction 153, 157, 248–9, 251 on figurative predication 253–5 rejects genus maiestaticum 154–5, 232, 239, 249–53 rejects IBS 155–6 pervasive influence of 31

on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 157, 250 on ‘nature’ in Chalcedon 156 on predication in abstracto 157, 249, 251 on predication ‘in natural matter’ 254 on real vs. verbal predication 235–6 accepts SG-possession 247 on signification of ‘humanity’ 153 on signification of ‘man’ 153 on soul–body analogy 156–7, 246 accepts supposital union 244–6 on theandric activity 247 on totus–totum distinction 242–3, 246–7 on union of natures 239 Biel, Gabriel on CN-semantics 14–15 definition of communicatio idiomatum in 21 BMP in Andreae 242 in Brenz 96–7 contrast with IBS 97–8 body, double rejected by Calvin 133 Boethius on definition of person 10 Bonaventure on identical predication 48 Boquin, Pierre 163 Brandy, Hans Christian 147n.27, 151–2 Brenz, Johannes and asymmetry of communicatio idiomatum 96 and Brenzian communicatio 96, 99–100 Christology of in 1527 101–2 Christology of in 1529 102–3 Christology of incompatible with Chalcedon 97, 113 Christology, later 145–52 on Christ’s earthly life 150–2 on Christ’s exaltation 102–3 on circumscriptive presence 114 rejects CN-semantics, 109–110 on Col. 2:7 147–8 communicatio idiomatum explained by hypostatic union ac. to 104–5 on communication of divine nature 146–7 on concrete–abstract distinction 96, 100 on Cyril of Alexandria 110 development of B.’s Christology 101, 141, 145 on distinction between divine essence and power 149–50 on divine simplicity 149–50 on genus idiomaticum 99–100, 104–5, 109–10

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

 on genus maiestaticum 100, 102–7, 111–12, 114–15, 150–1 genus maiestaticum explains hypostatic union, ac. to (1564) 146–9 on hypostatic union 95–6, 98–9 and John a Lasco 105–7 and Luther 103–4, 116 influence of Luther on 103–4 and Melanchthon 115 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 107, 150–2 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 91–107, 113–14, 150–2 on participation in the divine nature 152 on real vs. verbal predication 109–12 on repletive presence 114 sameness* in 99 and Scholastic theology 37 and Schwenckfeld 118–19 on signification of ‘man’ 96, 100 on soul–body analogy 109 and Stuttgart Colloquy 105–7 rejects supposital union 145–6 rejects totus–totum distinction 113 and Vermigli 143, 145–6 Bucer, Martin 87 and Wittenberg Concord 120–1 Bugenhagen, Johannes on power of Christ’s human nature 66n.99 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 66n.99 Bullinger, Heinrich on alloiosis 108–9 accepts CN-semantics 108–9 on hypostatic union 108 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 108 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 108, 152–3 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 108 Buys (Busaeus), Jan on communication of subsistence 231n.17 on supposital union 231n.17 Calvin, John 32–3 on action at a distance 121, 137–9 on causal presence 137–8 accepts CN-semantics 123 on communicatio idiomatum as figure of speech 123 on concrete–abstract distinction 135 and the Consensus Tigurinus 120–1 on double body 133 on figurative predication 123

279

and Hesshus 120–1 on hypostatic union 122, 124 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 102–3, 121–2, 135–6 on location of Christ’s human nature 137 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 132–5 and Andreas Osiander 136–7 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 136–8 on SG-possession 121–2, 139 on soul–body analogy 122 substance of Christ’s body in Eucharist ac. to C. 138 on totus–totum distinction 134–5 and Westphal 120–1, 127–8 and Zwingli 121–3 categories, Aristotelian 2 CGM₁-semantics 187 CGM₂-semantics 224 Chalcedon, Council of Brenz’s Christology incompatible with 97, 113 decree of 1–2 Chemnitz, Martin on Augustinian problem 223–4 accepts CN-semantics (1578) 211, 213–15 on Christ’s earthly life 183–4, 221 on Christ’s exaltation 183–4, 186–7, 222 rejects communication of divine essence 183–5 on communication of natures 212 on concrete–abstract distinction 213, 215n.122 on created SG-possession 181, 215–16 on divine simplicity 223–4 on fire–iron analogy 178–9, 185–6, 217–19 on genus apotelesmaticum 22–3 on genus idiomaticum 22–3, 180–2, 213–15 on genus maiestaticum 23–6, 181–3, 216–24 genus maiestaticum defended on Scriptural grounds 216 on hypostatic union 178–9, 210–11 hypostatic union distinct from genus maiestaticum 212–13 hypostatic union grounded on supposital union 186 accepts LH-semantics (1570) 180–1 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 184–5, 217–18 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 184–5, 217–18 accepts omnipresence of Christ’s exalted human nature (1578) 222–3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

280



Chemnitz, Martin (cont.) accepts omnivolipraesentia (1570) 186–8 definition of person in 179–80, 211 person bears human accidents ac. to (1570) 180–1 person does not bear human accidents ac. to (1578) 184–5 on predication in abstracto 215n.122 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 187, 222–3 on real vs. verbal predication 214–15 on secondary esse 180 on soul–body analogy 23–4, 178–9 on supposital union 179–80, 210–11 see too Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio Christ, body of, see Christ, human nature of; Eucharist, presence of Christ’s body in Christ, earthly life of ac. to Andreae 161–5, 240 ac. to Aquinas 103 ac. to Brenz 150–2 ac. to Chemnitz 183–4, 221 ac. to Decisio Saxonica 257–8 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 204–6 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 205–6 ac. to Wigand 176–7 see too Christ, exaltation of Christ, exaltation of ac. to Brenz 102–3 ac. to Chemnitz 183–4, 186–7, 222 ac. to Decisio Saxonica 257–8 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 205–7 ac. to Hesshus 128–9 ac. to Westphal 127 see too Christ, earthly life of Christ, human nature of adorability of ac. to Andreae 237–8 ac. to Beza 157, 250 ac. to Luther 68–9 ac. to Vermigli 145 created gifts of ac. to Andreae 237–8 see too SG-possession as instrument of person ac. to Andreae 160 ac. to Aquinas 160n.109 ac. to Athanasius 160n.109 ac. to Hervaeus Natalis 160n.109 as life-giving ac. to Andreae 237–8 ac. to Beza 157, 250 ac. to Bullinger 108

ac. to Calvin 102–3, 121–2, 135–6 ac. to Chemnitz 184–5, 217–18 rejected by Duns Scotus 72n.120 ac. to Lasco 105–6 ac. to Luther 69–70 in Melanchthon 87, 93–4 ac. to Vermigli 145 ac. to Westphal 127 location of, in heaven ac. to Augustine 132 ac. to Calvin 137 omnipotence of ac. to Andreae 165, 237–8, 242–3 rejected by Beza 250–1 ac. to Brenz 107, 150–2 ac. to Chemnitz 184, 217–18 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 205–6 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 206–7 rejected in Grundfest 199 ac. to Hesshus 128–30 ac. to Schegk 166 ac. to Westphal 127 see too Christ, human nature of, power of omnivolipraesentia of ac. to Chemnitz (1570) 186–8 ac. to Grundfest 198–9 ac. to Hesshus 130–1 ac. to Melanchthon 86–7 ac. to Wigand 177–8 see too Christ, human nature of, omnivolipraesentia of omnipresence of ac. to Andreae 162, 165 rejected by Beza 157, 250 ac. to Brenz 91–107, 113–14, 150–2 ac. to Bugenhagen 114n.99 rejected by Bullinger 108, 152–3 rejected by Calvin 132–5 ac. to Chemnitz (1578) 222–3 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 207–9 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 206, 208 rejected in Grundfest 199 rejected by Hesshus 129–30 rejected by Lasco 105–6 ac. to Luther 59–65 ac. to Melanchthon 60–1, 94 ac. to Schegk 166–7 rejected by Vermigli 144–5 ac. to Westphal 127, see too Eucharist, presence of Christ’s body in; Christ, human nature of, omnipresence of

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

 omniscience of ac. to Andreae 237–8 rejected by Beza 250 power of ac. to Aquinas 66 ac. to Bugenhagen 66n.99 ac. to Duns Scotus 66n.98 ac. to Luther 65–8 see too genus maiestaticum Christ, omnipresence of ac. to Aquinas 113n.96 CN-semantics 17 rejected by Andreae 234–7 in Beza 157 rejected by Brenz 109–10 in Bullinger 108–9 in Calvin 123 in Chemnitz (1578) 211, 213–15 in Duns Scotus 17–18, 57 in Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 203–4 in Grundfest 193–4 in Melanchthon 88–9 in Andreas Osiander 136n.67 in Vermigli 17, 142–4 in Wigand 172–4 communicatio idiomatum asymmetrical ac. to Andreae 240–2 asymmetrical ac. to Brenz 96 defined 21 defined, ac. to Biel 21 ac. to John of Damascus 21–2 defined, ac. to Luther 82–4 defined, ac. to Ockham 83 distinctive of hypostatic union ac. to Andreae 233 explained by hypostatic union ac. to early Brenz 104–5 figurative ac. to Beza 253–5 figurative ac. to Calvin 123 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 200–2 ac. to Melanchthon 88–9 see too alloiosis; genus idiomaticum; genus maiestaticum communication of divine essence ac. to Brenz 146–7 rejected in Chemnitz 183–5 ac. to Gerlach 231n.17 rejected by Wigand 175 see too communion of natures communication of person ac. to Wigand 171, 175–6 see too communication of subsistence communication of subsistence ac. to Andreae 231–4

281

ac. to Beza 231 ac. to Buys 231n.17 ac. to Gerlach 231n.17 see too communication of person communion in existence ac. to Aquinas 231n.17 see too subsistence, communication of communion of natures ac. to Andreae 232 ac. to Chemnitz 212 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 204, 207 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 204, 207 see too communication of divine essence; natures, union of concrete–abstract distinction 27–8 ac. to Andreae 228–31, 240–2 ac. to Beza 153, 157, 248–9, 251 ac. to Brenz 96, 100 ac. to Calvin 135 ac. to Chemnitz 213, 215n.122 ac. to Durand of St Pourçain 29–30 ac. to Grundfest 195 ac. to Hesshus 29–31 ac. to Luther 42–4, 46–7 ac. to Melanchthon 88–9, 92–3 ac. to Wigand 172, 174 see too ‘humanity’, signification of; ‘man’, signification of; predication in abstracto Consensus Dresdensis on definition of person 190–1 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 199 on supposital union 190–1 Consensus Tigurinus 120–1 Constantinople II (Council) 68–9 Curaeus, Joachim on bodily collocation 199–200 on bodily extension 199 on definition of person 190–1 on Luther’s rhetorical excesses 198 on predication in abstracto 192–3 on supposital union 167 Cyril of Alexandria on Christological semantics 13 on hypostatic union 3–4, 6 on nature 6 on substance–accident analogy 6 on soul–body analogy 3–4 de Libera, Alain 77n.136 Decisio Saxonica 256–9 on Christ’s earthly life 257–8

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

282



Decisio Saxonica (cont.) on Christ’s exaltation 257–8 on genus maiestaticum 257–9 dependence, hypostatic, see union, supposital distinction, formal ac. to Duns Scotus 25n.70 rejected by Luther 50n.48 ‘divinity’, signification of ac. to Luther 43n.16, 81–2 Duns Scotus on authority of Christ’s human nature 66n.98 on CN-semantics 17–18, 57 on divine person and human properties 57 on divine simplicity 25n.70 on formal distinction 25n.70 on identical predication 48 rejects life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 72n.120 on definition of person 10–11 rejects sacramental causality 72n.120 on subsistence of human nature 10–11 on supposital union 6–10 Durand of St Pourçain on concrete–abstract distinction 29–30 Ephesus II (Council) 69n.107 esse, secondary ac. to Aquinas 180n.77 ac. to Chemnitz 180 essence, divine, communication of, see communication of divine essence, communion of natures essence–energies distinction in Greek theology 223–4, 261–2 ac. to John of Damascus 25 in Lutheran theology 261 Eucharist, presence of Christ’s body in ac. to Berengar of Tours 69n.106 ac. to Bullinger 108 ac. to Calvin 136–8 in Chemnitz 187, 222–3 in Grundfest 198–9 ac. to Hesshus 130–1, 140 and identical predication 51–3 ac. to Luther 51–3, 64 ac. to Melanchthon 87, 89–90, 93–4 ac. to Westphal 127–8 in Wittenberg Concord 120–1 Eutyches 3 fire–iron analogy in Andreae 240 in Chemnitz 178–9, 185–6, 217–19 in Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 206

first act–second act distinction ac. to Andreae 163–4 in Luther 53–4 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias 191–2 formal distinction, see distinction, formal Formula of Concord 86, 189 disagreement between Epitome and Solida declaratio 209 authority of Luther in 200 see too next two entries Formula of Concord, Epitome accepts BGM-semantics 202 accepts BH-semantics 202 accepts Brenzian communicatio 200–2 on Christ’s earthly life 204–6 on Christ’s exaltation 205–7 on communion of natures 204, 207 on nature of genus maiestaticum 205–6 on hypostatic union 201–2 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 205–6 on omnipresence of Christ’s earthly nature 209 on omnipresence of Christ’s exalted nature 207–8 on real vs. verbal predication 202 on signification of ‘man’ 201–2 on union of natures 204 Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio accepts CN-semantics 203–4 on Christ’s earthly life 204–5 on Christ’s exaltation 205–6 on communion of natures 204, 207 and fire–iron analogy 206 on genus idiomaticum 203–4, 206–7 on genus maiestaticum 202–3, 207 on nature of genus maiestaticum 206 on hypostatic union 204 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 206–7 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s earthly nature 208 on omnipresence of exalted body 206, 208 on signification of ‘man’ 203 genus apotelesmaticum ac. to Chemnitz 22–3 see too activity, theandric genus idiomaticum ac. to Brenz 99–100, 104–5, 109–10 ac. to Chemnitz 22–3, 180–2, 213–15 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 203–4, 206–7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

 ac. to Hesshus 126 ac. to Wigand 171 see too communicatio idiomatum genus maiestaticum ac. to Andreae 25–6, 159–65, 239–40 rejected by Beza 154–5, 232, 239, 249–53 ac. to Brenz 100, 102–7, 111–12, 114–15, 150–1 originates in Brenz 24–5 ac. to Chemnitz 23–6, 181–3, 216–24 ac. to Decisio Saxonica 257–8 nature of ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 205–6 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 202–3, 207 nature of ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 206 ac. to Gerhard 24n.69 rejected in Grundfest 190–4 ac. to Hesshus 130–1 and hypostatic union ac. to Chemnitz 212–13 and hypostatic union ac. to late Brenz 146–9 not in Luther 59–65 rejected by Major 194, 197 rejected by Andreas Osiander 136n.67 ac. to Lucas Osiander the Elder 194–5 ac. to Schegk 168–9 ac. to Westphal 127 ac. to Wigand 170, 174–8 ac. to Württemberger Bekenntnis 197–8 see too communicatio idiomatum genus tapeinoticum 33n.91 not in Luther 82n.148 Gerhard, Johann on genus maiestaticum 24n.69 Gerlach, Stephan on the communication of the divine essence 231n.17 on the communication of subsistence 231n.17 GMP 97 ‘God’, signification of ac. to Luther 82 Gregory of Nazianzus on hypostatic union 4 Grundfest influenced by Beza 191–2 critical of Chemnitz 189–90 on CN-semantics 193–4 on concrete–abstract distinction 195 rejects genus maiestaticum 194 on identification of genus maiestaticum and hypostatic union 190–3

283

rejects omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 199 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 199 on omnivolipraesentia 198–9 on definition of person 190–1 on predication in abstracto 195 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 198–9 on real vs. verbal predication 194 on soul–body analogy 190–1 on unorthodoxy of Brenzian communicatio 196 critical of Wigand 189n.2 H-semantics 18 habitus theory of Incarnation ac. to Aquinas 41 ac. to Lombard 41 ac. to Luther 41 Hardenberg, Albert 125 Heidelberg, University of 37n.98 Hesshus, Tilman on action at a distance 137, 140 on Augustinian problem 216n.128 and Calvin 120–1 on Christ’s exaltation 128–9 on concrete–abstract distinction 29–31, 126 on divine simplicity 216n.128, 261 on genus idiomaticum 126 on genus maiestaticum 130–1 on hypostatic union 126 rejects IBS 131 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 128–30 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 129–30 on omnivolipraesentia of Christ’s human nature 130–1 on predication in abstracto 30–1 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 130–1, 140 Hoe von Hoenegg, Matthias 257n.9 Holcot, Robert on the Trinity 80n.143 ‘humanity’, signification of ac. to Beza 153 ac. to Luther 42–3, 43n.16, 44–5 ac. to Ockham 44–5 see too concrete–abstract distinction; ‘man’, signification of Humbert of Silva Candida 69n.106 hypostasis, see person hypostatic union see union, hypostatic

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

284



IBS 62–3 contrast with BMP 97–8 rejected by Beza 155–6 rejected by Hesshus 131 in Luther 61–3 rejected by Vermigli 144–5 rejected by Wigand 177–8 see too Christ, human nature of, omnipresence of identity, defined 2 indiscernibility of identicals, principle of 2 intention, terms of first and second 30 kenosis ac. to Aquinas 103 see too Christ, earthly life of Jerome 152–3 John of Damascus on communicatio idiomatum 21–2 on essence–energies distinction 25 on perichoresis 4 justification ac. to Andreas Osiander 136–7 Kirchner, Timotheus on Augustinian problem 224n.169 Klinge, Hendrik 169n.10, 186–7, 222 König, Johann Friedrich Christology of 259–60 Krypsis–kenosis controversy 256–9 Lasco, John a and action at a distance 105–6 and Brenz 105–7 on life-giving character of Christ’s body 105–6 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 105–6 and Stuttgart Colloquy 105–7 Leibniz, Gottfried on hypostatic union 4n.10 Leo I (Pope) on Christ’s activity 14 LH-semantics 19 in Chemnitz (1570) 180–1 in Luther 18–19, 56–7, 78–80 Lombard, Peter habitus theory in 41 on divine omnipresence 115 on totus–totum distinction 113 LS-semantics 51 Luther, Martin accepts actiones sunt suppositorum 77–8 on adorability of Christ’s human nature 68–9 rejects alloiosis 77–8, 80–1

on authority of Christ’s human nature 65–8 influence on Brenz 103–4 on circumscriptive presence 63–4 on Col. 2:9 61 definition of communicatio idiomatum in 82–4 on concrete–abstract distinction 42–4, 46–7, 81–2 on definitive presence 63–4 on figurative predication 15–16, 78 on first act–second act distinction 53–4 rejects formal distinction 50n.48 rejects genus maiestaticum 107 rejects genus tapeinoticum 82n.148 habitus theory in 41 accepts IBS 61–3 on identical predication 48–53 on idioma 10 accepts LH-semantics 18–19, 56–7, 78–80 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 69–70 on mixture of divine and human properties 77n.137 on Nestorius 78–9 ‘new language’ theory of theological terms 36–7, 43–4 nominalism of 42–3 follows Ockham 44–7, 55–6 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 59–65 person bears human accidents ac. to 56–7, 78–80 on power of Christ’s human nature 65–8 on predication in abstracto 55, 68 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 51–3, 64 on repletive presence 63–5 on Scholastic theology 34 and Schwenckfeld 117–18 on SG-possession 59–65 on signification of ‘divinity’ 43n.16, 81–2 on signification of ‘God’ 82 on signification of ‘humanity’ 42–3, 43n.16, 44–5 on signification of ‘man’ 42–5, 54–5 accepts supposital union 40–2 on supposition of accident terms 54–5 on supposition of ‘man’ 45–7, 54–5 on transubstantiation 39–40, 52–3 on two-name theory of predication 39–40, 46–8 Mahlmann, Theodor 35n.95 Major, Georg

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

 rejects genus maiestaticum 194, 197 on definition of person 190–1 on predication in abstracto 195 accepts supposital union 190–1 ‘man’, signification of ac. to Andreae 227–31, 234–5 ac. to Aquinas 28–9 ac. to Augustine 96 ac. to Beza 153 ac. to Brenz 96, 100 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 201–2 ac. to Luther 42–5, 54–5 ac. to Ockham 44–5 see too concrete–abstract distinction; ‘humanity’, signification of; predication in abstracto ‘man’, supposition of ac. to Aquinas 29 ac. to Luther 45–7, 54–5 ac. to Ockham 45 Marburg, Colloquy of 39 Maulbronn, Colloquy of 157–8, 163–5 Meisner, Balthasar on Christological mereology 96n.46 on Christological unity 99 on the predicables 9n.23 Melanchthon, Philip and Brenz 115 on Col. 2:9 90 accepts CN-semantics 88–9 on communicatio idiomatum 88–9 on concrete–abstract distinction 88–9, 92–3 on figurative predication 20, 88–9 on hypostatic union 88, 91–2 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 87, 93–4 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 60–1, 94–5 on multivolipraesentia 86–7 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 87, 89–90, 93–4 on praedicatio inusitata 20 on predication in abstracto 93 on SG-possession 89–90, 93–4 on soul–body analogy 91 accepts supposital union 91–2 and Wittenberg Concord 120–1 Mentzer, Balthasar 257 mereology, Christological in Meisner 96n.46 see too BMP; totus–totum distinction miaphysitism, characterized 3 Mörlin, Joachim 9n.22

285

monophysitism, characterized 3 Montbéliard, Colloquy of 226–7 Natalis, Hervaeus on instrumentality of Christ’s human nature 160n.109 nature 5 in Cyril of Alexandria 6 as particular 6 see too nature, subsistence of nature, subsistence of 11n.31 rejected by Aquinas 10–11 ac. to Duns Scotus 10–11 ac. to Ockham 10–11 natures, union of ac. to Andreae 232 ac. to Beza 239 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 204 see too communion of natures; union, hypostatic Nemesius of Emesa 4n.9 Nestorianism ac. to Andreae 249 characterized 3 ac. to Luther 78–9 Nestorius 3 ‘new language’ theory in Luther 36–7, 43–4 Nicholai, Melchior on hypostatic union 256 nominalism 6 in Luther 42–3 and via moderna 37n.98 Olevian, Caspar 163 omnipresence, divine ac. to Aquinas 115 ac. to Lombard 115 see too Christ, omnipresence of; Christ, omnipresence of human nature of omnivolipraesentia, see Christ, omnivolipraesentia of human nature of Osiander, Andreas and Calvin 136–7 accepts CN-semantics 136n.67 rejects genus maiestaticum 136n.67 and justification 136–7 Osiander, Lucas the Elder on genus maiestaticum 194–5 see too Württemberger Bekenntnis Padua, University of 142 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 33n.92, 76n.134, 123n.10 participation in the divine nature ac. to Brenz 152

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

286



participation in the divine nature (cont.) in Greek theology 25, 261–2 in Medieval theology 25, 261–2 ac. to Schegk 169–70 see too essence–energies distinction Paul of Venice on identical predication 48 Pawl, Timothy 5, 13–14 Peleter, Francis 158n.91 perichoresis in John of Damascus 4 see too communion of natures; natures, union of; union, hypostatic, perichoretic models for person, definition of ac. to Boethius 10 ac. to Chemnitz 179–80, 211 ac. to Curaeus 190–1 ac. to Duns Scotus 10–11 ac. to Grundfest 190–1 introduced 1–2 ac. to Major 190–1 ac. to Ockham 11 ac. to Richard of St Victor 179–80 ac. to Schegk 166 Piscator, Henry 257 Porphyry on the predicables 9–10, 128 praedicatio identica, see predication, identical praedicatio inusitata ac. to Andreae 228–9, 230n.11, 254–5 ac. to Melanchthon 20 see too predication ‘in natural matter’ predicables ac. to Aristotle 9n.23 ac. to Meisner 9n.23 ac. to Porphyry 9–10, 128 predication, figurative in Beza 253–5 in Calvin 123 in Luther 16, 78 ac. to Melanchthon 20, 88–9 ac. to Zwingli 73–5 see too alloiosis; communicatio idiomatum; predication, real. vs. verbal predication, identical ac. to Bonaventure 48 and the Eucharist 51–3 ac. to Luther 48–56 in Luther’s ‘Thomist’ opponents 51 ac. to Paul of Venice 48 ac. to Scotus 48 and transubstantiation 52–3 and the Trinity 48–9 predication in abstracto 28 ac. to Beza 157, 249, 251

ac. to Chemnitz 215n.122 ac. to Curaeus 192–3 ac. to Grundfest 195 ac. to Hesshus 30–1 ac. to Luther 55, 68–9 ac. to Major 195 ac. to Melachthon 93 see too concrete–abstract distinction predication ‘in natural matter’ 20–1 ac. to Andreae 227–31, 234–5 ac. to Beza 254 ac. to Wigand 172 see too concrete–abstract distinction; praedicatio inusitata predication, real vs. verbal 19 ac. to Andreae 235–6 ac. to Beza 235–6 ac. to Brenz 109–12 ac. to Chemnitz 214–15 in Formula of Concord, Epitome 202 ac. to Grundfest 194 ac. to Schegk 168–9 ac. to Vermigli 143–4 ac. to Wigand 171–5, 177 ac. to Württemberg Bekenntnis 193 predication, two-name theory of in Luther 39–40, 46–8 in Ockham 46–7 predication, trivial vs. non-trivial 12–13 predication vs. bearing in Aquinas 26 in Aristotle 26 presence, causal ac. to Calvin 137–8 presence, circumscriptive in Brenz 114 ac. to Luther 64–5 presence, definitive ac. to Luther 63–4 presence, Eucharistic, see Eucharist, presence of Christ’s body in presence, local ac. to Westphal 127 see too presence, circumscriptive presence, repletive in Brenz 114 ac. to Luther 63–5 property, notion of introduced 10 qua-connective 19–20 Raitt, Jill 226n.2 Realism 6 and via antiqua 37n.98 reduplication, see qua-connective

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

 Richard of St Victor on definition of person 179–80 Ritter, Gerhard 36n.96 sameness* characterized 99 Schegk, Jacob influence on Chemnitz 168–9 on nature of genus maiestaticum 168–9 on IBS 166 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 166 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 166–7 on participation in the divine 169–70 on definition of person 166 on property bearing 167–8 on real vs. verbal predication 168–9 on supposital union 166 Schmid, Heinrich on genus maiestaticum 24 Schwarz, Reinhard 17 Schwenckfeld, Caspar 101, 116–19 and Brenz 118–19 Christ is not a creature ac. to 117 Christ’s human nature equal to divine essence ac. to 117 and Luther 72 Selnecker, Nikolaus on Augustinian problem 224n.169 Christology of 209n.96 Servetus, Michael 88 SG-possession (created) 24 in Beza 247 in Calvin 121–2, 139 in Chemnitz 206, 215–16 in Luther 59–65 in Melanchthon 89–90, 93–4 in Vermigli 145 Siddals, Ruth M. 6 signification, defined 28–9 in Aquinas 28–9, see too ‘divinity’, signification of; ‘God’, signification of; ‘humanity’, signification of; ‘man’, signification of simplicity, divine ac. to Augustine 15 ac. to Basil of Ceasarea 223n.168 ac. to Brenz 149–50 ac. to Chemnitz 223–4 ac. to Duns Scotus 25n.70 ac. to Hesshus 216n.128, 261 see too Augustinian problem; essence–energies distinction soul–body analogy 4, 26–7 in Andreae 160, 240, 246–7 in Athanasius 13–14

287

in Beza 156–7, 246–7 in Brenz 109 in Calvin 122 in Chemnitz 23–4, 178–9 in Cyril 3–4 in Grundfest 190–1 in Melanchthon 91 in Wigand 171 in Zwingli 58 Stuttgart Colloquy 105–7 substance ac. to Aristotle 1–2 supposital union, see union, supposital supposition, defined 29 in Aquinas 29 personal, defined 55, see too accident terms, supposition of; ‘man’, supposition of sustaining, hypostatic, see union, supposital theandric activity see activity, theandric Timann, Johannes 125 totus–totum distinction ac. to Beza 242–3, 246–7 rejected by Brenz 113 ac. to Calvin 134–5 ac. to Lombard 113 transubstantiation ac. to Luther 39–40, 52–3 Trinity ac. to Basil of Caesarea 5 ac. to Robert Holcot 80n.143 Tübingen–Giessen controversy 256–9 Turretin, Francis on Lutheran Christology 259 two-name theory of predication, see predication, two-name theory of UC-ordering 27 union, hypostatic 1–2 ac. to Andreae 158–9 ac. to Brenz 95–9 ac. to Bullinger 108 ac. to Calvin 122, 124 ac. to Chemnitz 178–9, 210–11 ac. to Cyril of Alexandria 3–4, 6 ac. to Formula of Concord, Epitome 201–2 ac. to Formula of Concord, Solida declaratio 204 ac. to Gregory of Nazianzus 4 ac. to Hesshus 126 ac. to Nicholai 256 perichoretic models for 3–5 ac. to Wigand 170–1 see too natures, union of; union, supposital

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/8/2019, SPi

288



union, supposital rejected by Andreae 158–9, 233–4, 244–5 ac. to Beza 244–6 rejected by Brenz 145–6 ac. to Buys 231n.17 ac. to Chemnitz 179–80, 210–11 ac. to Curaeus 190–1 ac. to Duns Scotus 6–10 and hypostatic union 26–7 ac. to Luther 40–2 ac. to Major 190–1 ac. to Melanchthon 91–2 ac. to Schegk 166 ac. to Vermigli 142 in Wigand 171 see too union, hypostatic Ursinus, Zacharias 156 Vermigli, Peter Martyr on adorability of Christ’s human nature 145 rejects Brenz’s semantics 143 on CN-semantics 17, 142–4 divine person does not bear human accidents ac. to 143–4 rejects IBS 144–5 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 145 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 144–5 on real vs. verbal predication 146 on SG-possession 145 on supposital union 142 Wengert, Timothy 94n.39 Westphal, Joachim rejects action at a distance 139 assimilates views of Luther, Brenz, and Bugenhagen 125 on bodily invisibility 127 and Calvin 120–1, 127–8 on Christ’s exaltation 127 on Consensus Tigurinus 120–1 on genus maiestaticum 127 intellectual inadequacy of 124–5 on life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 127 on local presence 127 on omnipotence of Christ’s human nature 127 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 127 on presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist 127–8 WGM-semantics 177

White, Graham 34n.93, 39n.2, 41, 57 Wigand, Johann on alloiosis 173–4 on Christ’s earthly life 176–7 on CN-semantics 172–4 rejects communication of divine nature 175 on the communication of the divine person 171, 175–6 on the concrete–abstract distinction 172, 174 on the genus idiomaticum 171 on the genus maiestaticum 170, 174–8 on the hypostatic union 170–1 rejects IBS 177–8 on multivolipraesentia 177–8 on predication ‘in natural matter’ 172 on real vs. verbal predication 171–5, 177 on soul–body analogy 171 on the supposital union 171 on theandric activity 176 William of Ockham definition of communicatio idiomatum in 83 influence of on Luther 44–7, 55–6 on definition of person 11 on signification of ‘humanity’ 44–5 on signification of ‘man’ 44–5 on the supposition of accident terms 55 on the supposition of ‘man’ 45 on subsistence of nature 10–11 on two-name theory of predication 46–7 Wittenberg Concord 120–1 Württemberger Bekenntnis on Brenz on genus maiestaticum 197 on omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 198 predication requires bearing ac. to 193 on real vs. verbal predication 193 on meaning of ‘wesentlich’ 194–5 Zell, Katharina Schütz 118n.123 Zwingli, Huldrych and Alexandrian theology 76–7 on alloiosis 71–5 and Calvin 121–3 on figurative predication 20, 73–5 on genus maiestaticum in Luther 65 on hypostatic union 58–9 rejects life-giving character of Christ’s human nature 72 on Luther’s rhetoric 125n.14 rejects omnipresence of Christ’s human nature 70–2 on presence of Christ’s body in Eucharist 71n.115 on soul–body analogy 58