Christ's Impeccability

Having established Christ’s actual sinlessness (impeccantia) in the previous thesis, we turn now to His impeccability (impeccabilitas) — His incapacity to sin at all — which the First Vatican Council intended to define as an article of faith,¹ making this proposition fidei proxima.

Three Theories of Impeccability

Theologians differ on how to conceive Christ’s impeccability. Anton Günther held the shallowest view, least consonant with Catholic belief: safeguarding Christ’s free will, he held Christ impeccable only because God foresaw from eternity that He would never actually sin — a merely consequent impeccability. Durandus, Scotus, and the Nominalists held instead that Christ’s impeccability rested not on any intrinsic quality of His will, but on an extrinsic disposition of Divine Providence, which prevented a will otherwise capable of sinning from ever yielding to temptation — “external impeccability,” a view that gained some traction from its resemblance to the Scotist account of the impeccability of the blessed in Heaven, and was expressly shielded from theological censure by a decree of Paul V. The third view, held by Peter Lombard and adopted by St. Thomas and his whole school as well as by the Jesuit theologians, holds that Christ is impeccable by virtue of an intrinsic quality of His will flowing from the Hypostatic Union itself — “internal impeccability,” the correct view.

The Argument from Scripture and the Fathers

Scripture does not expressly teach Christ’s impeccability, but the texts already cited for His sinlessness go far toward proving it. The Fathers and early councils, however, uphold it unanimously and trace it directly to the Hypostatic Union. St. Cyril of Alexandria: “All those who maintain that Christ was able to commit sin — I know not how — are foolish and without reason.”² St. Augustine teaches that the Hypostatic Union itself makes it impossible for Christ to sin: “It was by this [the grace of God] that a man, without any antecedent merit, was at the very moment of His existence as man so united in one Person with the Word of God that the very one who was Son of man was at the same time Son of God, and the very one who was Son of God was at the same time Son of man; and by the adoption of His human nature into the divine, that grace itself became, in a way, so natural to the man that there was no room left for sin to enter.”³ St. Leo the Great agrees: “We could not have overcome the author of sin and death, had our nature not been assumed and appropriated by Him whom sin cannot stain and death cannot hold.”⁴ St. Fulgentius states it with particular clarity: “The Godhead cannot be overcome; therefore the humanity of Christ, too, remained without sin, because it was assumed into the Godhead, which by its very nature is incapable of committing sin.” In keeping with this Patristic teaching, the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680) defined that Christ’s human will, though “deified,” was not thereby destroyed, but rather saved — following St. Gregory Nazianzen’s dictum that Christ’s willing, understood as it should be, “is not opposed to God, but wholly deified.”⁵

The Theological Reasons

St. Thomas states the theological grounds for Christ’s impeccability trenchantly: “Simply speaking, Christ was never able to sin. For He may be considered as a wayfarer or as a possessor [i.e., by the beatific vision], or as God. As wayfarer, He appears as a leader directing us along the right path… insofar as He was a possessor, His mind was wholly joined to its end… but insofar as He was God, both His soul and body were the instrument of the Godhead … hence sin could no more reach His soul than God Himself can sin.”⁶ Christ’s impeccability thus rests on three grounds: His mission as leader of the human race, His constant possession of the beatific vision, and the Hypostatic Union of the two natures. Of these, the last is by far the strongest — indeed the only strictly decisive one. The Fathers accordingly stressed that it would be no more reasonable to suppose the Godhead capable of sin than to suppose the Logos would permit His own human nature — entirely His own, by virtue of the Hypostatic Union — to be stained by even the slightest sin.

Durandus tried to weaken this conclusion by objecting that sin is no more repugnant to the Logos’s infinite holiness than death is to His eternity. But this misses an important asymmetry: passibility is no disgrace, while sin is. Passibility, being merely a malum poenae (an evil of punishment), can even become a good for the purposes of salvation, and so be assumed and sanctified within the Hypostatic Union. Sin, being a malum culpae (an evil of guilt), remains absolutely and unconditionally repugnant to God’s holiness under every circumstance. There is, then, no real parity between death and sin.⁷

The Free-Will Difficulty

But if Christ could not sin, how can He be said to have had a free will at all? And how could He take on suffering and death voluntarily to expiate our sins? De Lugo did not hesitate to call this one of the gravest problems in all of theology.⁸

Despite our inability to fully reconcile the two truths, both Christ’s free will and the reality of His human nature must be upheld equally firmly. “But I lay it [my life] down of myself, and I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. This commandment have I received of my Father” (John 10:18). St. Augustine: “The Mediator’s spirit showed that no punishment of sin brought Him to the death of the flesh, since He did not leave it unwillingly, but because He willed it, when He willed it, as He willed it.”⁹

The difficulty is sharpened by a dilemma: in suffering for us, Christ as man either acted by free choice or He did not. If not free, His Passion lacked merit and so could not redeem us. If free, He was able to disobey the Father’s command — that is, to sin. So it seems we must deny either His free will or His impeccability. The Scholastics devised a range of solutions to escape this — one Jesuit theologian, Francis Amicus, catalogued no fewer than eleven, the eleventh admitting seven further variations — yet no fully satisfying solution has ever been found. We review the more plausible attempts below.

De Lugo’s “Paternal Wish” Theory

Francis De Lugo (d. 1660) held that neither Christ’s free will nor the meritoriousness of His Passion was compromised by “the Father’s commandment,” because that commandment was not a strict, binding precept but simply a paternal wish, which the Son freely accepted — an acceptance which, with the Father’s consent, turned a merely conditional mode of redemption into an absolute one.¹⁰ St. Anselm seems to have held a similar view.¹¹ But sound exegesis resists reading the Father’s mandatum as a mere wish, since the New Testament consistently uses this term for a strict precept,¹² and Christ Himself, in urging obedience to God’s commands, never once excepts Himself: “If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love, as I also have kept my Father’s commandments, and do abide in his love” (John 15:10). Christ practiced obedience Himself: “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8) — and obedience, as St. Thomas defines it, “is a special virtue whose special object is a precept, tacit or expressed.”¹³ For these reasons the Thomists, Scotists, and many Jesuit theologians — Suarez, Vásquez, Gregory of Valentia, Toletus, John De Lugo, Christian Pesch, and Tepe — reject Francis De Lugo’s theory.¹⁴

Ysambert’s “Genus and Individual” Distinction

A second theory, devised by Ysambert and adopted by Gregory of Valentia, Vásquez, and Lessius — Cardinal Franzelin regards it as equally probable to the first — holds that the Father enjoined a strict precept to die, but left the manner of its fulfillment (time, place, motive, circumstance) to the Redeemer’s own free decision: the command bound Christ’s death in general but not in its individual execution.¹⁵ Doesn’t this still unduly restrict Christ’s freedom to a narrow range of accidental circumstances? Ysambert’s followers answer that these circumstances were so bound up with the command itself that substance and accident were effectively inseparable — just as the martyrs, though condemned to die and unable to escape it, still died freely and meritoriously. This reading has the merit of not straining the Biblical term “commandment,” but it remains less than fully convincing: to say Christ was free only regarding the concrete circumstances of His death is close to admitting He was not free to die or not die at all, while Scripture grounds the value of His death on the substance of His dying no less than on its manner.¹⁶ As De Lugo objects: “It seems we could not credit Christ with praise for simply and absolutely dying… nor say He redeemed men because He died, but only because He died then, or more willingly, or from this particular motive.”¹⁷ Still, Ysambert’s theory is not without some probability.

”Confirmation in Grace”

A third theory, held by the early Schoolmen, holds that Christ’s human will, though physically capable of sin, attained impeccability through a continuous series of actual graces, and was determined — freely, yet with infallible certainty — to accept the decree of His death by one especially powerful grace. This state is called “confirmation in grace,” and may also have been the Blessed Virgin’s own privilege. St. Bonaventure explains: a will’s determination to one course can happen either through the necessity of nature or through the confirmation of grace. If through natural necessity, freedom of choice — and with it the dignity of merit — is destroyed. If through the confirmation of grace, since such confirmation is compatible with a free will, the moral goodness of the act, being voluntary, is not destroyed, nor therefore its meritorious character. In Christ, his freedom of choice was determined to one course not by natural necessity but by the confirmation of grace.¹⁸ Among later Scholastics this view was held by Molina, Suarez, Lessius, and Tanner; its leading modern defenders are Cardinal Billot and Christian Pesch.¹⁹ Plausible as it is, most theologians reject it, for two reasons: first, it seems preposterous to grant that it was even physically possible for Christ — the Divine Logos — to commit sin; second, explaining Christ’s impeccability by anything other than the Hypostatic Union and the beatific vision reduces it to a lesser principle applicable to any saint. Some defenders answer the first objection by noting that the physical liberty to sin is an essential attribute of every rational creature, and so cannot itself be a reprehensible defect incompatible with the Hypostatic Union, provided the necessary safeguards — “confirmation in grace” foremost among them — prevent that liberty from ever actually issuing in sin. This defense is not very convincing. The second objection is easier to answer: “confirmation in grace,” properly understood, is really nothing but a necessary effect of the Hypostatic Union itself, which requires with metaphysical necessity that Christ’s human will be endowed with intrinsic impeccability by every moral means available to an omnipotent God.²⁰

The “Revocable Precept” Theory

A fourth theory tries to reconcile Christ’s free will with His impeccability by holding that He could, at any moment, have obtained from His Father a revocation of, or dispensation from, the strict command to die for mankind’s salvation — appealing chiefly to Matthew 26:53: “Thinkest thou that I cannot ask my Father, and he will give me presently more than twelve legions of angels?” Though Pallavicini boasted of having publicly opposed his own teacher De Lugo on this very point during the latter’s lifetime in Rome, the theory has found many adherents — Maurus Hurtado, Carleton, Mayr, Legrand, and more recently Tepe.²¹ We are inclined to think it effectively safeguards both truths at once: a precept remains binding only so long as the lawgiver does not dispense from it, and, in De Lugo’s own words, “no greater freedom can be conceived than accepting death in such a way that one could have refused it not only then, but at any time — since, though bound by the precept, Christ could easily have obtained its removal.”²²

Against this, Velasquez and Christian Pesch pose a dilemma: either the command to die was unconditional, in which case no dispensation was possible, or it was conditional, in which case none was needed. But De Lugo shows triumphantly against Velasquez that this argument proves too much, and so proves nothing: positive precepts, whether given to a community (as monogamy) or an individual (as the command to Abraham to sacrifice his son), are never essentially irrevocable or beyond dispensation.²³

Notes