The Passibility of Christ's Human Nature

The term “passibility” — capacity for suffering — when applied to our Divine Savior, means bodily infirmity to a degree involving the possibility of death, together with those psychical affections Aristotle and St. Thomas technically call passiones. Such physical defects and psychical affections must be assumed in Christ in order to safeguard His human nature and the genuineness of the atonement: the passibility of Christ is a necessary postulate of His Passion.

1. Heretical Teachings and the Church

To deny our Lord’s liability to suffering and death, or the full richness of His soul-life on earth, would amount to the Docetist claim that Christ merely bore the semblance of a man. From the opposite direction came Monophysitism — the doctrine of one composite nature in Christ — which logically leads to “Theopaschitism” (a worthy companion to Patripassianism) and to the equally heretical claim that Christ was simply incapable of suffering. Toward the close of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth, a Monophysite sect under Julian of Halicarnassus and Gajanus maintained that Christ’s body was incorruptible even before the Resurrection — not subject to decay. Their opponents dubbed them Aphthartodocetae, “teachers of the incorruptibility of Christ’s body,” or Phantasiastae, “teachers of a merely phenomenal body.”¹ Julian was at least consistent; his opponent Severus, the Monophysite Bishop of Antioch, contradicted his own premises by admitting the orthodox teaching that Christ shared in all the bodily sufferings and infirmities of human nature before His Resurrection — which is why the Severians were nicknamed corrupticolae.

The Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) had already laid it down as an article of faith “that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, and was crucified in the flesh, and tasted death in the flesh, and that He is ‘the first-born from the dead’ [Colossians 1:18], as He is life and life-giver inasmuch as He is God.”² Carefully distinguishing passibility from actual passion, the Decretum pro Iacobitis of Eugene IV, adopted at the Council of Florence (A.D. 1439), defines Christ as “God and man, Son of God and son of man … immortal and eternal by virtue of [His] Divinity, capable of suffering and temporal by virtue of [His] assumed manhood,” and affirms that “the Son of God in [His] assumed humanity was truly born of the Virgin; that He truly suffered, died, and was buried.”³ Though these definitions speak explicitly only of Christ’s liability to suffering and death, they plainly imply, at least by extension, the ordinary psychical affections that accompany suffering and death in every human life — a genuine human soul devoid of all such affection, or capable of bodily suffering without any corresponding grief of soul, is simply inconceivable.

2. The Teaching of Divine Revelation

The heretical claim that Christ was incapable of suffering is manifestly repugnant to Holy Scripture and Tradition.

The Scriptural Argument

One need only open the Gospels almost anywhere to find Christ, in His human nature, subject both to ordinary bodily infirmity and to genuinely human affections of soul. His life confirms and completes Isaiah’s prophetic picture of the “man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3). He “was hungry” (Matthew 4:2) and “thirsted” (John 19:28); He was “wearied” (John 4:6) and fell “asleep” (Matthew 8:24); He shed His blood and died. He showed distinctly human emotion — standing before the tomb of His friend Lazarus, He “groaned in the spirit and troubled himself … and wept” (John 11:33–35); finding the Temple full of money-changers and merchants, He, ordinarily so gentle, was moved to holy anger and drove them out with a scourge (John 2:15); His eyes rested with tender regard on the rich young man who had kept the commandments from his boyhood (Mark 10:21). He rejoiced (John 11:15) and sorrowed (Matthew 26:37–38), marveled (Matthew 8:10), and was overtaken by fear and heaviness (Mark 14:33). St. Paul gives the theological reason for all of it: “For nowhere doth he take hold of the angels: but of the seed of Abraham he taketh hold. Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest before God, that he might be a propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:16–17).

The Patristic Argument

The Fathers agree with Scripture on every point, except that they exclude every physical and moral defect from Christ’s human nature explicitly, where Scripture does so only by implication.

St. Ambrose argues simply that Christ must have felt and acted as a man because He possessed a human nature: whoever holds that Christ took on human flesh while denying Him human feeling “takes the man out of man, since man cannot exist without human feeling.”⁴ St. Leo the Great observes that the Hypostatic Union of the two natures in Christ requires the coexistence of contrary properties: “the impassible God did not disdain to be a passible man, and the immortal to be subject to the laws of death.”⁵

The one dissenting voice is St. Hilary of Poitiers (d. 366), whose great work De Trinitate — written to establish the Church’s Christology against Arianism, and reckoned by Bardenhewer the most imposing anti-Arian work of the early Church⁶ — seems in places to teach that Jesus was simply insensible to pain. St. Hilary has been accused of heresy on this count since antiquity (by Claudianus Mamertus, later by Berengar and Baronius), and even Erasmus counted him among the Docetae; a modern scrutiny of the text by Dom Lawrence Janssens reaches much the same conclusion.⁷ The majority of Catholic theologians, led by Peter Lombard, defend Hilary and read him in line with orthodox teaching; a third group, including William of Paris and Petavius, holds that Hilary’s original teaching in De Trinitate was mistaken but that he tacitly retracted it in his later Commentary on the Psalms.

Pohle finds the objections to Hilary largely a matter of interpretation rather than dogma, and is unpersuaded that Hilary actually retracted anything — the Commentary on the Psalms contains passages fully consistent with the disputed ones in De Trinitate, such as Hilary’s remark that Christ, struck down by God, was pursued with suffering added to suffering, “for according to the Prophet he grieves for us.”⁸ The difficult passage itself, from De Trinitate X, 13, holds that though blows fell on Christ’s body, wounds pierced it, and the Cross suspended it, “these brought the onset of suffering, but did not inflict the pain of suffering” — that Christ suffered, in the sense of being struck and dying, but that the suffering which assailed His body “did not exert the nature of suffering,” His bodily power receiving the force of punishment “without a sense of pain.”

Two lines of defense have been offered. On one reading, Hilary by “Christ” and “the nature of Christ” here really means the Person and nature of the Logos — which indeed cannot feel pain — so that “virtue of body without sense of pain” simply restates the impassibility of the Godhead as such. On another, Hilary’s zeal in defending Christ’s Divinity against the Arians led him to overstate the a priori excellence of Christ’s humanity and its prerogatives over ordinary human nature. Hilary does clearly teach a real, threefold difference between the God-man and other men: Christ could not be overcome by bodily pain, was under no compulsion to suffer, and His suffering did not carry the character of punishment.⁹ It cannot fairly be said, then, that Hilary sacrificed the dogma of Christ’s passibility outright to his exalted sense of the God-man’s majesty — but Pohle judges that he did fail to find the right path between the Arian and the Aphthartodocete extremes, and did not give due weight to the Scriptural and ecclesiastical teaching on the true extent of Christ’s capacity for suffering. He erred, in other words, but on a comparatively minor point: he had before his mind’s eye an idealized Christ, capable of suffering yet under no necessity to, and, defending that Christ’s Divinity against determined adversaries, overrated the historic Christ of the Gospels to match. Bardenhewer is not being unduly severe when he says Hilary’s teaching here “makes a very sharp turn around the headland of Docetism.”¹⁰

3. The Limitations of Christ’s Passibility

Given the plain teaching of Scripture and the Church, theologians circumscribe the dogma of Christ’s passibility with careful limits, excluding from His human nature any defect of body or soul that would have been unbecoming to a God-man. They distinguish passiones universales — defects flowing from human nature as such — from passiones particulares, due to accidental or particular causes.

The universal affections include hunger and thirst, fatigue and worry, pain and mortality, joy and sorrow, fear and disgust, hope and love. The particular defects are partly bodily — malformation, deafness, blindness, leprosy, epilepsy — and partly of the soul — feeble-mindedness, idiocy, vindictiveness, concupiscence.¹¹ As Christ’s body was exempt from these particular natural defects, so His soul was immune from every psychic defect connected with sin: He was not only free from every sinful affection, but was at all times fully master of His soul, so that no unfree first movements of passion, let alone anything further, could surprise or overpower Him. St. Jerome expresses this in a phrase that became technical: the soul of Christ knew no passiones in the strict sense, but only propassiones — first stirrings brought under the will’s control before they become full passions.¹²

Regarding the ordinary weaknesses of the body specifically, St. Thomas gives three reasons why it was fitting for the Savior to share them: He came to make satisfaction for the sins of men; without such defects there would be room to doubt the genuineness of His human nature; and He gave us, by bearing them, an example of patience.¹³ In fallen man such defects are punishments for sin; not so in Christ, who was wholly free from guilt — hence the technical phrase that He assumed poenalitates (penal consequences) that involved no culpa (guilt).

4. A Historical Controversy

This account also settles the merits of a controversy that arose during the lifetime of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, between the Premonstratensian abbot Philip of Harvengt and a certain Canon John. John rightly held Christ’s passibility to be spontaneous and natural, though voluntarily assumed; Philip, appealing to what he took to be St. Hilary’s authority, held impassibility to be the God-man’s normal condition, with His actual weakness and suffering explained as a continuous series of miracles — the forty-day fast, the walking on water, and similar wonders manifesting His “true” nature, while His reported hunger after the fast and His ordinary subjection to gravity were themselves the abnormal, miraculous exceptions. This theory runs against the plain words of St. Paul (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15) and the settled teaching of the Church and the Fathers.¹⁴ That these natural defects were voluntarily assumed does not make them unreal: their assumption coincided with the moment of Christ’s voluntary Incarnation itself, which already implied His eventual Passion, and therefore His passibility, for the sake of the atonement.¹⁵

Further Reading

St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, 3a, qu. 14, 15 — G. Patiss, Das Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi nach der Lehre des hl. Thomas, Ratisbon 1883 — J. Rappenhöner, Die Körperleiden und Gemütsbewegungen Christi, Düsseldorf 1878 — Fr. Schmid, Quaestiones Selectae ex Theologia Dogmatica, qu. 6, Paderborn 1891 — G. A. Müller, Die leibliche Gestalt Jesu Christi, Graz 1909.

Notes