The Painlessness of Christ
For many, book X of De Trinitate is where Hilary’s brilliant theology find its end. It is here, some say, that Hilary loses his orthodoxy, thus loses Christ and the Faith. In book X Hilary takes up the notion of Christ’s suffering in the flesh. Hilary believes that while he suffered, he did not feel pain. Why does Hilary think that? Prior to his discussion on it, Hilary responds to heretical claims against Christ having an impassible nature because of the fear he demonstrated during his Passion week, thus ultimately submitting to suffering (De Trin. 10.9). He challenges their reading of these texts (Matt 26:38–39, 46; Luke 23:46), asking why would he, who drove away the fears of death in his apostles with the inheritance of glory to come, fear suffering and death? If death is life (i.e., Matt 10:38–9), “what pain can we think He had to suffer in the mystery of death, Who rewards with life those who die for Him?” (De Trin. 10.10). And Hilary questions why would Christ, whose life and act of death that were by his own choosing, according to the plan of God, be stricken with fear, as the one who has the power to lay down his life and to take it up again? And so, he concludes, stating, “if Christ died of His own will, and through His own will gave back His Spirit, death had no terror, because it was in His own power” (De Trin. 10.11).
Interesting to say the least. Hilary continues his dialectical monologue, asking that if Christ did fear death, was it terrible to his Spirit or his body? It cannot be to his body because the Holy One will not see corruption as Scripture foretold (Ps. 15:10) nor can it be his Spirit, in that we see Lazarus rejoicing in Abraham’s bosom, and obviously Christ is supremely greater than them; therefore, the abyss of hell is not waiting for him, and so he has nothing to fear (De Trin. 10.12). In conclusion, Hilary rather pointedly states:
It is foolish and absurd, that He should fear death, Who could lay down His soul, and take it up again, Who, to fulfil the mystery of human life, was about to die of His own free will. He cannot fear death Whose power and purpose in dying is to die but for a moment: fear is incompatible with willingness to die, and the power to live again, for both of these rob death of his terrors. (De Trin. 10.12)
But Hilary questions the issue further, inquiring about the kind of body “the Man Jesus was, that pain should dwell in His crucified, bound, and pierced body.” The human body, writes Hilary, is endued with life and feeling, by conjunction of a sentient soul. Thus, it is the soul that feels various sensations (cold, heat, pleasure, hunger, paint, etc.). And through a “transfusion of the soul” with the body, when the body is pierced, for example, it is the soul that feels and suffers pain. The implication of this psycho-somatic pathology is that when a limb becomes diseased, it loses the feeling of living flesh, and it can be cut or burnt, and no pain is sensed “because the soul is no longer mingled with it” (De Trin. 10.14). And when a limb needs to be cut off, drugs can lull the soul to sleep, whereby the limb can be removed without pain. Hilary’s estimation of this phenomena leads him to conclude that “the body lives by admixture with a weak soul, that it is subject to the weakness of pain” (De Trin. 10.14).
In contrast to the nature of the human body, Jesus’ body, which is of true humanity after the likeness of our flesh, Hilary writes, “when it was struck with blows, smitten with wounds, or bound with ropes, or lifted on high, He felt the force of the suffering but without its pain” (De Trin. 10.23). Hilary identifies a key distinction between Christ’s body and our bodies: “His conception was in the likeness of our nature, not in the possession of our faults” (De Trin. 10.25). In Christ taking on flesh, his sinlessness, due to his divine nature, meant that the body he took “possessed a unique nature of its own” (De Trin. 10.23); it could suffer, but it could not feel pain. Hilary’s position stems from his understanding of the term “likeness.” For Hilary, likeness implies the truth of his birth, but it removes sin and human weakness from him. In his decision to take on flesh in the form of a servant, Hilary bifurcates the Incarnation, delineating the human and the divine side of Christ, stating that “Christ as man submitted to a human birth; yet as Christ He was free from the infirmity of our degenerate race” (De Trin. 10.25). For Hilary, it is imperative that he retain the fullness of each nature in the person of Christ, with the distinction noted above. The Word taking on flesh, because he is the Word and is not of human origin, does not “vacate the nature of His Source.” And while we must believe that the Word is flesh (which he made), in his dwelling among us, “the flesh was not the Word, but was the flesh of the Word dwelling in the flesh” (De Trin. 10.25). And because of the unique nature of his body, brought forth through “spiritual conception,” not a natural one, the Word had the power to expel the infirmities of the body (De Trin. 10.35).
Hilary is confident that he has proved his point. But, it is still baffling to hear his closing confession of book X, when he writes:
He was born for us, suffered for us, died for us, rose again for us. This alone is necessary for our salvation, to confess the Son of God risen from the dead: why then should we die in this state of godless unbelief? If Christ, ever secure of His divinity, made clear to us His death, Himself indifferent to death, yet dying to assure that it was true humanity that He had assumed: why should we use this very confession of the Son of God that for us He became Son of Man and died as the chief weapon to deny His divinity? (De Trin. 10.71, emphasis added).
In our study of Hilary (again, this is taken from my lecture notes), his theological prowess and apologetical resolve were quite remarkable. His engagement with his subject matter was intense, his rigorous attention to the details of an argument and ability to make tight, logical connections was astounding. So, it is perplexing to see how someone of his intellectual stature could arrive at the conclusion he did regarding Christ’s painlessness. One the one hand, there is a speculative logic that makes sense, but on the other, if Christ is to redeem man, then he had to take up man—all of that is proper to man (minus the sinfulness). And pain is a distinct aspect of the human condition that can drastically impact what we do. Fear of pain and actual pain in the flesh can cause us to cave in to our own sinful desires and turn away from the Lord. And if Jesus was to redeem man for his weakness, then he must also overcome pain of the body in order to be obedient to the Father. No human can look at the passion of Christ without first intuitively considering the pain he went through. And that is one of the glorious aspects of the resurrection—no more pain. And that is what we are promised in Revelation 21:4.
~ Romans 11:36
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1. The following statements are a summary from the Introduction on Hilary in NPNF, 2nd Series.
2. Carl L. Beckwith, “Suffering without Pain: The Scandal
of Hilary of Poitiers’ Christology,” in In the Shadow of the Incarnation:
Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in Honor of Brian E. Daley, S.J
(Notre Dame: IN, 2008), 71.
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