Christ's Substantial Sanctity

Thesis IV: The human nature of Christ, in virtue of the Hypostatic Union, was and is substantially sanctified by the increate holiness of the Divine Logos.

Nearly every theological school holds this thesis. By “substantial sanctity” we do not mean sanctifying grace, but the peculiar holiness worked in Christ’s human soul by its very incorporation with the Divine Logos in the Hypostatic Union. Only the Scotists dissent, holding that Christ’s holiness is purely accidental — the product of sanctifying grace alone.¹ Because of this dissent, the thesis cannot be called a strict theological conclusion, only communis in the technical sense — the common, though not universal, opinion.

How Can Holiness Be Communicated Substantially?

Under the ordinary rules of the Communication of Idioms, the Logos’s “increate sanctity” would seem no more transferable to a creature than His immensity or omnipotence. Why, then, do Catholic theologians — who reject the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity precisely on these grounds — make an exception for sanctity?

It is true the Logos’s divine sanctity cannot be transferred to a mere creature any more than any other divine attribute can. But the manhood united to the Logos, by the very fact of becoming “the second nature” of a Divine Person, must be infinitely pleasing to God, and so infinitely holy, even apart from any question of sanctifying grace. By the Hypostatic Union the man Jesus is the natural Son of God, in whom the Father must be infinitely well pleased — but He could not be well pleased in one who lacked holiness.² The man Jesus, then, whether or not endowed with sanctifying grace, is substantially holy simply by virtue of His Hypostatic Union with the Logos, who is substantial sanctity. Holiness is thus the one divine attribute substantially communicable to a creature.

Does this substantial communication of a divine attribute imply Monophysitism or Pantheism? It does not, for two reasons. First, holiness in a human being involves only an ethical relation to God. Second, while the Logos’s infinite sanctity is held to be communicable to the creature, it is not communicated in an infinite manner. As Suarez observes: “The grace of union is infinite in its kind, and renders human nature infinitely pleasing [to God], though not equally with Divinity itself — for Divinity is pleasing by its very essence, while humanity is pleasing only through its union with Divinity; hence the one is infinite absolutely, the other only in a certain respect.”³

The Scriptural Argument

That Jesus, as man, was substantially sanctified by His Hypostatic Union with the Logos can be shown from Scripture. “The Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35) — here Christ’s Divine Sonship is given as the very ontological reason for His sanctification in the womb. The man Jesus was holy because He was the Son of God; and since divine sonship depends on the Hypostatic Union as its indispensable condition, the Hypostatic Union alone sufficed to sanctify Christ’s humanity.

St. Paul, alluding to the Messianic Psalm 44:8, compares Christ’s substantial sanctity to an anointing of His humanity with Divinity: “Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows” (Hebrews 1:9). Origen comments: “Just as the substance of an ointment differs from its scent, so Christ differs from His fellows [the prophets and Apostles]. And just as a vessel containing the substance of an ointment can in no way take on a foul smell, while those who wander too far from its scent may contract one [i.e., by sin], so it was simply impossible for Christ — the vessel containing the substance of the ointment itself — to contract the odor of sin.” This reading of the Psalm is common among the Fathers. St. Ambrose: “It is God who anoints, and it is God, the Son of God, who is anointed according to the flesh. For whom, after all, does Christ have as sharers in His anointing, if not those who share His flesh? You see, then, that God was anointed by God; but it is in the assumption of human nature that the Son of God is designated as anointed.”⁴ St. Gregory of Nazianzus puts the same thought more tersely: “God the Father anointed Christ with the oil of gladness above His fellows when He united human nature with the Godhead, so as to make the two into one.”⁵ The whole argument can be condensed: Hypostatic Union = substantial anointing = substantial sanctification.

The Name “Christ” Itself

The name “Christ” itself, though used figuratively, admirably captures the essential constitution of the God-man. It derives from the Greek verb “to anoint,” designating our Lord as the Anointed One in a special, pre-eminent sense — describing neither merely the Son of God nor merely the Son of man, but the God-man as such, and so a truly proper, personal name.

In the Old Testament, priests, kings, and prophets were consecrated with holy oil and thereby became accidentally “anointed of the Lord.”⁶ Christ, who unites the three offices of priest, king, and prophet in His own Person, is alone anointed with an anointing that is formally substantial — since the invisible ointment of the Godhead, the Divine Substance itself, permeates and perfects His human nature by virtue of the Hypostatic Union. The Fathers are unanimous in reading the name “Christ” this way. St. John Damascene: “We call ‘Christ’ a personal name, because it is not taken one-sidedly, but designates a twofold nature. For He anointed Himself: as God, He anointed His body with His Divinity; as man, He received the anointing, since He is both God and man.”⁷ Human nature so substantially anointed with Divinity must itself be substantially holy. St. Gregory Nazianzen: “[The Son] is called Christ on account of His Divinity, for this is the anointing of His humanity — sanctifying not merely by an external operation, as with other ‘anointed ones,’ but by the very presence of the whole anointing substance, whose effect is that He who anoints is called man, and that which is anointed is made God.”⁸ St. Augustine: “In whom [the Word] the Son of man Himself was sanctified from the very beginning of His creation, when the Word was made flesh — since Word and man became one Person. Then, therefore, He sanctified Himself in Himself — that is, man in Himself as the Word — since the one Christ, Word and man, sanctifies man in the Word.”⁹

A Careful Qualification

The Hypostatic Union does not, however, communicate to Christ’s soul, formally and substantially, “the love God has for Himself” — the vital, immanent act of the Divine Trinity constituting the innermost essence of divine holiness itself.¹⁰ God’s intrinsic essence is no more communicable to creatures than His own act of self-knowledge.¹¹ What is substantially and formally communicable is God’s so-called objective holiness — the dignity, majesty, and adorableness of the Logos — which mediately effects the moral sanctity of the man Jesus, making Him not merely sacred but holy in the fullest sense.¹² On this ineffable, infinite dignity of the God-man rests both the adorability of Christ’s humanity and the infinite meritoriousness of every free act His soul performed.

A further, subtler question divides theologians: does the sanctity of Christ’s human nature formally consist in the Logos’s Personality, or in His Divinity, or in both? The more common opinion — St. Thomas, Suarez, De Lugo — holds that the substantial sanctity of Christ’s manhood is formally communicated by the Logos’s Personality, which incorporates itself immediately and formally with His humanity in the Hypostatic Union. Others hold that since the Logos’s Person is the possessor and bearer of the Divine Nature, that Divine Nature must be regarded as at least the mediate sanctifying form of His humanity. A third theory holds the Godhead, abstracted from its bearer (the Logos), to be the immediate and formal sanctifying form — an absurd and dangerous hypothesis, since it risks reducing the Hypostatic Union to a mere natural synthesis. Vásquez seems to have sensed this danger, since he never pressed his own thesis — “the sanctifying form is the very Godhead itself”¹³ — to its full conclusions, basing it instead on Patristic phrases like “deification” and “the anointing of humanity by Divinity.” Scheeben reads these phrases, in St. Cyril’s own sense, as referring to the divinely spiritual nature of the Logos as the formal principle of sanctification — without ever separating Personality from Nature, since the two are so intimately united in the Logos that both together penetrate and perfect His human nature.¹⁴

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