The Adorableness of Christ's Humanity: Preliminary Notions and Thesis I
1. Preliminary Notions
Worship is reverential respect paid to another; it always requires two numerically distinct beings — one who shows respect, and another (person or thing) to whom or to which it is shown. There are as many kinds of worship as there are perfections calling for it. Worship due to God alone is latria, adoration proper. Worship owed to creatures on account of supernatural excellences they possess through sanctification and union with God is dulia. The Blessed Virgin Mary, uniquely excellent as Mother of God, receives a special worship distinct from that given to lesser saints — hyperdulia.
Adoratio (Greek proskynesis), in Church usage and Scholastic theology, is a generic term covering both latria and dulia; context determines which is meant in any given case. Rendering divine worship to a mere creature is idolatry, and a most grievous sin.
These forms of worship further divide according to whether they are directed to a prototype or to a mere “ectype.” A prototype is the original, proper possessor of adorable excellence — always a person, never a mere object; worship given to a prototype is absolute (subdividing, in turn, into absolute latria and absolute dulia). An ectype is always an object, never a person; worship given to it is relative — relative latria (given, e.g., to an image of Christ or the Trinity) or relative dulia (given to a relic, a saint’s picture, and the like).
A further, important distinction: the material object of worship is the person or thing honored; the formal object is the underlying reason or motive for the honor. Since there is no worship without some reason, material and formal object are always linked — but the link can take different forms. It may be a relation of identity, as in God Himself, where nature and adorability simply coincide. It may be a relation of physical union, as in Christ’s humanity, made adorable by its Hypostatic Union with the Logos. Or it may be a relation of merely moral union, as with images and relics of the saints, which owe their status as objects of worship entirely to their relation to their prototypes — worship in this last mode is always strictly relative.
A special case of the formal object is the so-called obiectum manifestativum — a formal object that, though somewhat remote in itself, has a particularly effective, concrete appeal to the worshipper. A beggar kisses his benefactor’s hand because the benefactor’s goodness manifests itself especially through that particular part of the body — yet the veneration is really directed at the benefactor himself. Likewise, we may prefer to adore God as our benefactor rather than as the Supreme Being simply, because His mercy touches our hearts and gives concrete expression, as it were, to the adorability of His Divine Majesty. So too we adore the Five Wounds of our Savior, since they manifest His infinite love for us in a special way — though the real and ultimate object of that worship is always the God-man Himself.1
2. The Dogma
The divine worship we give the unincarnate Logos as such is simply identical with the adoration of the one true God. The only real questions here are whether we may, and indeed must, adore Christ as the Word Incarnate. These resolve into three: Is the God-man (Christ in both natures) entitled to divine adoration? Must we also adore the man Jesus — Christ’s concrete sacred humanity as such? And is it permissible to render divine worship to individual members of that sacred humanity, His Sacred Heart in particular? We take up each in turn.
Thesis I: Christ as the God-man Is Entitled to Divine Worship
This is a truth of faith. To adore Christ differently as man than as Son of God would be to fall back into Nestorius’s heresy of two persons in the God-man. The Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) settled the true relation by adopting St. Cyril’s eighth anathema: “If anyone dares to say that the man assumed [by the Logos] ought to be co-adored with God the Word … as one alongside another … and does not rather worship Emmanuel with a single act of adoration, … according as the Word was made flesh, let him be anathema.” The Fifth Council of Constantinople (A.D. 553) made this still more explicit: “If anyone says Christ is adored in two natures, thereby introducing two acts of adoration, one for God the Word separately and one for the man separately, or if anyone does not adore God the Word Incarnate together with His own flesh by one single act of worship … let him be anathema.”2 It is thus an article of faith that the God-man as such is owed exactly the same worship as the unincarnate Divine Logos.
The Biblical argument rests partly on instances of divine adoration given to our Lord — by the Magi, by the man born blind — and partly on Christ’s own explicit claim to divine worship, echoed by His Apostles. He Himself commands that “all men should honor the Son, as they honor the Father” (John 5:23). St. Paul: “And let all the angels of God adore him” (Hebrews 1:6), and lays down as a divine precept “that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” (Philippians 2:10).
The Fathers ground the “single adoration” owed to the God-man in the fact that He was Son of God and true God after the Incarnation exactly as before it — the Logos became man by the Hypostatic Union, so the man Jesus is true God and worthy of divine adoration. As St. Cyril told Nestorius: “We do not adore a man who merely bears God within him, but God made man.”3 Even Theodoret of Cyrus, himself suspected of Nestorian leanings, concedes: “After the Incarnation, no less than before it, we adore the one Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and call those who think otherwise unbelievers.”4