>The short answer is, I don't know how much treatment this topic has received
>in religious literature. But in general theological terms, I wouldn't be
>very happy with this position; it doesn't seem to me at all an obvious
>implication of the 'humanity' of Christ. Orthodox Christian doctrine
>maintains that Christ is 'like us, in all things except sin' and the ability
>to apprehend every detail of the forthcoming Passion would be something
>quite unlike us.
Dear Bill,
By his human nature, i.e. his human body and soul, Christ was certainly
'like us, in all things except sin', and yet at the same time he was also,
very much unlike us, the 'perfection' of human nature. Moreover, by his
divine nature he had divine knowledge 'of all things'. If even his perfect
human knowledge did not include knowledge of the passion, his divine
knowledge certainly did include this knowledge. Having this divine
knowledge, there was probably no need for him to use his human imagination
in order to anticipate the passion, yet he may still have been *free* to do
so. In this case Angela's view (as reported by Franc,ois) that "his
imagination, through its divine power, could sharply apprehend every detail
of the forthcoming Passion" might still be orthodox except in its
explanation "through its divine power" (because I suppose that human
imagination cannot possess divine power but can nevertheless -- in the case
of Christ -- be perfect).
My trick with "not having to but being free to" is of course stolen from
Aquinas, who uses it somewhere in his discussion whether Christ recurred to
phantasms.
Yours,
Otfried
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