Since the earliest days of the Church, theologians have struggled
to understand how humanity and divinity coexisted in the person of
Christ. Proponents of the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus could
not have been fully divine, found significant scriptural evidence
of their position: Jesus wondered, questioned, feared, suffered,
and prayed. The defenders of orthodoxy, such as Hilary of Poitiers,
Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, and Augustine, showed considerable
ingenuity in explaining how these biblical passages could be
reconciled with Christ's divinity. Medieval theologians such as
Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, also grappled with
these texts when confronting the rising threat of Arian heresy.
Like their predecessors, they too faced the need to preserve Jesus'
authentic humanity and to describe a mode of experiencing the
passions that cast no doubt upon the perfect divinity of the
Incarnate Word. As Kevin Madigan demonstrates, however, they also
confronted an additional obstacle. The medieval theologians had
inherited from the Greek and Latin fathers a body of opinion on the
passages in question, which by this time had achieved normative
cultural status in the Christian tradition. However, the Greek and
Latin fathers wrote in a polemical situation, responding to the
threat to orthodoxy posed by the Arians. As a consequence, they
sometimes found themselves driven to extreme and sometimes
contradictory statements. These statements seemed to their medieval
successors either to compromise the true divinity of Christ, his
true humanity, or the possibility that the divine and human were in
communication with or metaphysically linked to one another. As a
result, medievaltheologians also needed to demonstrate how two
equally authoritative but apparently contradictory statements could
be reconciled-to protect their patristic forebears from any doubt
about their unanimity or the soundness of their orthodoxy.
Examining the arguments that resulted from these dual pressures,
Madigan finds that, under the guise of unchanging assimilation and
transmission of a unanimous tradition, there were in fact many
fissures and discontinuities between the two bodies of thought,
ancient and medieval. Rather than organic change or development, he
finds radical change, trial, novelty, and even heterodoxy.
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