Marie-Joseph Nicolas, “Notes For an Integral Theology of the Redemption”

Brief Translator Introduction

The present text is a translation of an article by Marie-Joseph Nicolas, O.P. (1906–1999), “Pour une théologie intégrale de la Rédemption,” Revue thomiste 81 (1981): 34–78. I wanted to take some time reflecting on the theology of the redemption and remembered briefly skimming this work some time back. Nicolas, who is not well known, was a very clear thinker and wrote some important works on, for example, the Mother of God, the nature of theology, the theology of the resurrection, the priesthood, theology and evolution, and was involved in great conflicts of the 1940s regarding theological methodology. He was also an active author in the Revue Thomiste. His brother, Jean-Hervé is perhaps better known, but Fr. Marie-Joseph deserves wider recognition. (This past summer, a Dominican from the Toulouse province spoke very highly to me about M.-J. Nicolas’s exemplary holiness.)

This essay is being presented because of its merits as a truly sapiential theological presentation of soteriology. I thank Fr. Philippe-Marie Margelidon, O.P., of the Revue Thomiste for permitting the public presentation of this translation. Likewise, I thank Mitchell Kengor for help in pre-processing the relevant digital files (as part of the translation process). Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Michael Liccione for occasioning my translating of this text because of comments on social media sometime near Pascha in 2024.

I have chosen to translate directly out of Nicolas for selections from Scripture and other sources, for the sake of rhetoric, though with an eye to the original where appropriate. Because of his rhetorical choices and slight excisions, I have retained Latin in the footnotes for such cases. In some footnotes he included only Latin, with no corresponding translation elsewhere. In such cases, I translated the Latin and did not include the Latin in the translation itself.

Introduction (Nicolas)

The divine response to the scandal that was the Messiah’s defeat and death was the triumph of His resurrection. In response to Christ’s astonishing cry from the Cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 15:34), the Father replied: I have not forsaken you, I have “delivered you from the pains of death”; the power of death has not held you fast (cf. Acts 2:23). And in reply to Christ’s total surrender of His life into the hands of the Father (cf. Lk. 23:46), the Father responded by making Him “the Prince of Life” (Acts 3:15). His resurrection accredited Him as Messiah and Universal Judge (cf. Acts 17:31). And all that He was, all that He did, and all that He said on earth thereby retrospectively receives a divine seal. In His name, the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to all. For “God has exalted Him by His right hand..., to give Israel conversion and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31). This complete forgiveness, this reconciliation of man with God, of the creature with the Creator, is the New Covenant, that is, the advent of the Kingdom of God, eternal life, and the beginning of the eschaton. Salvation is given in the name of Jesus, in whom we must believe and trust, and in Him alone. Even though the terms of the first proclamation of the resurrection and salvation were addressed primarily to Israel—a striking sign, especially in a Lucan source, confirming the age of the text itself and, therefore, of its authenticity—it is already aimed at all men: there is no salvation except in Him, for there is “no other name under heaven offered to men that is necessary for salvation” (Acts 4:12). Such perspectives would explode the first nucleus of Christ’s faithful into a universal, missionary Church. By rising from the dead, by passing from earth to “heaven,” from His earthly to His glorious condition, Christ becomes the “Head” of the universe, the unique priest of all humanity, the source of all forgiveness, of all justification, of all life, the source of the Spirit, He who fulfills the destiny of every human being by incorporating them into His own destiny, He who by triumphing over death in Himself triumphed over human death, He who having entered into the glory of the Father draws and welcomes His brothers in humanity, “so that where I am,” He says, “they too may be with me” (Jo. 17:24). And this exaltation, which earns him the Name above every name and manifests Him as Lord, equal to God (cf. Phil. 2:6–13), only serves to make His humanity radiantly manifest what He is from all eternity as Son of God.

All these themes, which constitute the essence of the Christian message and appear from the first days of its proclamation so that they might take on an ever-greater scope over the course of the Church’s life and expansion, constitute the very content of a theology of the resurrection. It is almost an easy task—indeed an exhilarating one at that—to show its sequence and meaning, but it presupposes that we have first answered the question: why did “Christ need to suffer this in order to enter into his glory” (Lk. 24:26)? Why was there a resurrection, i.e., a passage through death, through a violent and cruel death, and not an immediate transfiguration? Why was the Cross needed in order for there to be glory?

Thus, we find ourselves faced with the formidable theology of the Redemption—formidable because it scrutinizes the mystery, one that is far more than metaphysical, a mystery that is properly divine, concerning a “Wisdom” which, Saint Paul tells us, is both folly and scandal for the world and human reason (cf. 1 Cor. 1:18–25). “And we do not speak of it,” he says, “in the language taught by human wisdom, but in that taught by the Spirit, expressing what is spiritual in spiritual terms” (1 Cor. 2:13). And he adds: “The man merely of soul, the ‘psychic’ man (i.e., man left to his own ‘reason’) does not accept what comes from the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14). And this is a formidable theology, also, because it raises the question concerning another mystery, no longer concerning God Himself but, rather, concerning the creature, namely, the mystery of evil whose “solution” is painful and almost as “scandalous” as evil itself. And, likewise, it is a formidable theology, too, because in our own days it has been taken back to the drawing board, being subject to criticism root and branch. Nonetheless, it is a theology whose soul is a simple faith prior to all explanation, one that every Christian explanation must uphold in its pure, original essence.

This faith is what Paul formulated in an affirmation that he himself received in order to pass it on, an affirmation accompanying the attestation of the resurrection: “I have passed on to you first of all what I myself received: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3). “For our sins,” “because of our sins,” and therefore for us, for our salvation, which means: so that we may live. Thus, we read in Saint John: “The Good Shepherd lays down His life for His sheep” (Jn. 10:11). And again: “My flesh is given for the life of the world” (Jn. 6:51). Saint John emphasizes the gift of life to others through the sacrifice of one’s own life, and we must always remember this so as not to confine the mystery of Redemption to the abolition of sin. Nonetheless, in Saint John we also read: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29). And it was “for the remission of sin” that “the blood of the Covenant was shed” and offered (Mt. 26:28). This is why, if baptism gives new life, it does so by making us sharers in Christs death and resurrection (cf. Rom. 6:3f.). All this means, prior to any analysis, that Jesus’ death was a gift of Himself and that He died out of love for us. if we believe in the mystery of Redemption as it has been revealed to us, what we believe in is this love, the greatest of all, the love that makes us “give our lives for those whom we love” (Jo. 15:13). “This is how we now know Love: He laid down His life for us” (1 Jo. 3:16). It is a love that is as just as much, indeed inseparably, that of God as it is that of Jesus Himself: “God so loved the world that he gave His only Son” (Jn. 3:16). “He did not spare His own Son... Nothing can separate us from the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8: 32, 39). But also: “The charity of Christ urges us on, with the thought that one died for all” (2 Cor. 5:14). “Christ loved you and gave himself up for us, offering Himself as a sweet-smelling sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2). And in words that express it all, words that we could justly say are the very expression of the Church’s first and eternal faith: “my present life in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20).

Therefore, the life we are given, in which our salvation consists, is given to us through Jesus’s death on the Cross. The risen Jesus is its wellspring, but he was able to become such a source only because He first passed through this death; only thus can be delivered from sin and death.

But how did Christ’s suffering and death become a means of salvation, and in particular a means for the condition of salvation that is the destruction of sin and death? This question is no longer answered by a direct affirmation of faith but, rather, involves a number of concepts that today find themselves to be subject to vigorous questioning.

In point of fact, we find these concepts (more often metaphors than concepts) already in the apostolic writings, and they truly cannot be entirely dissociated from the message of faith. From their earliest reflections on the Cross of Christ, Christians spoke of sacrifice, redemption, atonement, reconciliation, purification, and victory over the enemy. The more elaborate idea of satisfaction was merely a more rigorous interpretation of that of ransom, of a price paid, a debt paid. Everything in human affairs, whether secular or religious, that might bear some resemblance to the unspeakable work performed for us by Christ on the Cross—right down to the ideas of substitution (in place of...), identification, and incorporation and recapitulation—has been used, though with a renewed meaning that theology must strive to understand. Therefore, these concepts need to be purified, deepened, mutually supported by each other, treated with all the resources of analogy, and situated within the whole of the Christian economy and its spirit.

In this effort to reinterpret scriptural and traditional soteriological concepts, one sometimes goes too far. “For us” is reduced to the idea that Jesus died, certainly, for the sake of sinners (those who killed him, and who represented so many others) and for having spoken and lived a truth that He himself bore, a truth which was for us. He would have died for mankind, as one dies for one’s country or for the progress of humanity, or better still, to speak the truth, to make it believed: like a Socrates, like a hero, like a faithful prophet. His death would not in itself be salvific, except as a seal affixed to His message (“I only believe stories whose witnesses would have their throats slit”¹). Of course, there are degrees to this system of interpretation. Unless one wishes simply to renounce the Christian faith and reduce Jesus to being just one of the pure and generous heroes and prophets found throughout the history of mankind, it could be said that this is a complete sort of message, addressed to all men, coming directly from God, a message of absolute importance, with the value of a hapax, a unique and saving event. However, this would not have required Jesus, as a man, to have been aware of the significance of His death and all that was to come from it. And it would not be as—or because—offered by Him that it would save us. However, so as not to entirely disregard the value of His death, one might say that without it there would have been no resurrection, this dazzling manifestation of divine power, which gives credence to Christ’s message and gives each of His earthly words and historical deeds and gestures an absolute and universal value. In the final analysis, it not so much Jesus’ death that would save but, rather, the “Word” that gives it meaning by proclaiming it, and which, stemming from unconditional faith in God even in the midst of death, gives rise to the same faith until the end of time. And while such interpretations of the life and death of Jesus as the bearer of the divine act of salvation are completely disproportionate to what can be said of any other man, we do not find in them the simple and primary idea of the Christian faith that the suffering and death of Christ are in and of themselves the condition and source of our life, nor that Jesus gave his life for this.

And what remains as the basis for their transcendence, if not the testimony of early Christian preaching? However, their preaching speaks only of their saving value. And the Church’s living and internal [sic] tradition has brought us the image of Jesus crucified only with faith in the saving power of His suffering and death.

Yet the idea of redemption through pain and death must be acceptable, not merely to human reason and sensibility, but also to faith itself, to all that is equally and even primarily professed about the God of the Gospel and the conditions of salvation. And yet, such as it is presented by its critics, it is not acceptable: a theory of expiatory sacrifice, of the immolation of an innocent victim substituted for sinners to be punished in their place, or a theory of “satisfaction” “in strict justice,” demanded by an infinitely offended God before He can grant forgiveness. The idea of God underlying such an explanation would be that of a jealous, cruel god, a whole primitive idea, psychoanalytically interpretable as that of a “monstrous superego,” an obsessive “father” whom we simultaneously desire to kill and imitate. The man of today finds this to be a totally unbearable idea. But would it ever have been so for the Christian man, if that were really what had been instilled into him? Can we really say that the age-old contemplation of the crucified Christ has imprinted such an idea of God on the hearts of men? In fact, this is truly a caricature of what the Church’s age-old faith has declared and transmitted. Certainly, we can cite unfortunate expressions of the dogma of Redemption. Not only have orators, popularizers, and catechists been clumsy in their use of sacrificial and legal language. However, this is not so much due to the survival of the unconscious and primitive schemas that today serve as the universal principle of interpretation for moral and religious beliefs, as to a fearless logic in their handling of concepts and words in far too univocal a fashion. And there can be no doubt that it is vital that Christian theology purify itself of all such dross and oratorical and pedagogical conveniences. However, the movement of truly great theology was born has been precisely in the direction of such purification. This movement is not to be denied, but to be taken up, continued, and brought to its ultimate goal. And we can draw powerful aid from the spur offered by contemporary criticism—which is more traditional than critics today think, given the ancient and continuously repeated nature of the difficulties they raise—for they force us to highlight many aspects of the mystery, through their humanist demands, which are also Christian demands. Truly, we do not desire to lose anything that has been thought or sensed to be right and fruitful. The danger involved in any theology of the Redemption is that of systematization around a single, incomplete idea. Our starting point is an enthusiastic proliferation of ideas inspired by the contemplation of the Incarnate Word dying on the Cross (the unheard-of truth of His Incarnation!) and for us (the unheard-of revelation of Love). Our goal is to bring all this abundance into focus and order. To be a true interpretation of faith, theology must be integral, embracing all the aspects of the mystery, ordering them in relation to each other, while nonetheless leaving intact the immense horizon of the unknown, the incomprehensible, what is intuited but not yet seen.

The statement of such a project makes it clear that this can only be a sketch, an essay, a contribution to an integral theology of the Redemption, as modest in its result as it is ambitious in its purpose. It explains the overall plan of this study. First of all, I would like to expand on what I call the two ways of accessing the mystery of the Redemption that are so clearly discernible in Tradition and call for a synthesis. This will then enable us to interpret the scriptural notions of sacrifice and redemption in their entirety, with the admirable broadening of perspective they allow.

However, before all these investigations, I would like to propose a clarification intended to prevent many misunderstandings and difficulties.

I. – Preliminary Clarifications

1. Integral notion of salvation.—The idea of salvation is not simply that of deliverance from sin and death. That would be too negative. In reality, salvation is concerned with leading mankind to perfection, that is, to the fullness of life, to divinization. Even if man had never sinned, such salvation would have had to be achieved over time, with the constant risk of being lost. The Incarnation could have taken place without sin, and Christ’s role would then have been to be the author and consummator of such salvation, bringing men to their fulfillment in God. In fact, sin did take place, and neither the fullness of life nor divinization are possible without the abolition of sin and death. But Christ’s saving work is defined by this new man, this new world which has Him as its principle, through His death and resurrection. Let us be direct: salvation is the “Face of God” appearing at last to mankind for all time.

But a complete idea of salvation goes far beyond the destiny of the soul. It is concerned with salvation, that is, the preservation and supreme, definitive fulfillment of the whole human being, body and soul, man’s nature being saved at the very heart of his divinization. We must never forget this divine will to save everything about man, even his sinful flesh and the freedom that he has lost.

And the word and idea of divinization, of eternal life, of consummation in another world, beyond the bounds of time, in God Himself, should not lead us to disregard the temporal aspect of salvation under which it first appeared in the form of messianic hopes. Everything that has already been achieved—granted, against the active forces of evil—in the salvation brought by Jesus Christ, is destined to manifest itself in human life on earth. Certainly, man will be saved (“we are saved in hope,” Rom. 8:24) from temporality, and above all from all the evil, pain, and guilt that accompany it, as well as from the weight of His carnal body—but only on the condition that all that time and the flesh already contain of eternal values be saved with him.

2. Did God will the Crucifixion of his Son?—Our answer is: no, God did not directly will Jesus’ crucifixion, nor the failure of His mission that led to it. Much to the contrary, this was the manifestation of man’s most essential rebellion against God and his will.

But, on the other hand, yes, God willed the Incarnation of the Word in vulnerable, mortal flesh. Yes, He sent Jesus into a hostile, sinful world to save it, exposing Him to failure, hatred, and death. Yes, He abandoned Him to the laws of nature and the interplay of human freedoms, without intervening with His power: “to be abandoned by His Father,” says Saint Thomas, “means no more than not to be protected by Him from those who crucified Him.”² But what He directly willed in this evil that He allowed to be carried out against Himself was for Jesus to suffer it with love and in our name: “Although God does not will the death of men, He does will the fortitude with which man endures it and exposes himself to the perils of death out of love. And in this sense, we can say that God willed Christ’s death insofar as Christ assumed it out of love and valiantly endured it.”³ And it was God Himself who placed this love in His heart.

And so it is for all unjust and cruel violence suffered by all. Violence is not what is willed by God, but only the nature and freedom that are deployed against Him, and above all the good that He Himself wills to do in response to this evil.

3. Was Jesus’ death necessary?—What does "necessary" mean here? First, let us distinguish Jesus’ death from violent death. Jesus’ death was part of the logic of the Incarnation: He assumed our human condition as it is, with the exception of sin. “It was by virtue of His human nature that Christ had to die. Thus, we must simply admit that He had to die, not only from the perspective of the purpose of His death, but also out of absolute necessity, in such a way that He would have died even if He had not been killed.”⁴ This is what Saint Augustine already had literally said,⁵ adding that the work of our redemption would still have been accomplished. The murder of Jesus was the work of men and their freedom.

But could the crucifixion not have taken place? And could Jesus’ saving mission have unfolded quite differently?

In the eternal present, where God sees everything, we can say that whatever happens can no longer fail to have happened. He who, like the prophet, like Jesus himself, participates in this divine light even before the event takes place, will be able to say, “it must be…,” and, if this light reaches Him through inspired Scripture: “it is written.” “The certainty of divine foreknowledge does not exclude the contingency of singular events. Indeed, it bears to them insofar as they are present and already determined. This is why even prophecy, which is the sign or likeness of the divine foreknowledge imprinted upon a human mind, does not exclude, through its immutable truth, the contingency of things to come.⁶

But, of itself, in itself, the event is a work of freedom. It is possible that it could fail to take place. Adam might not have sinned. Everything would have been different for men and for the world. I could have not sinned: everything would have been different for me and for many others. There could have been no Incarnation. Jesus might not have been rejected and crucified. How many things could have been different, for good or ill, in the history of the Church and of salvation!—Of course, God does not change His plans according to our actions. It would be pointless to ask ourselves, “What would have happened if?” God takes our freedom into account in His eternal and unique plan. Jesus is eternally intended as crucified and redeemer, because man’s guilt and rejection of Christ are eternally foreseen and known by God, while also remaining their own work.

But then, if Jesus had not been crucified, would we have not been saved? Saint Thomas insists that man could have been saved without Christ, without redemption through the Cross, by an act of pure and simple forgiveness. When he asks, “Why the Incarnation, why the Cross?,” he always answers: because in this way, man’s salvation is much more admirably realized, with infinitely more love—and, in any case, without in the least infringing on man’s freedom, indeed better still, magnifying it beyond anything it has ever been able to claim in sin.

4. Can we say that Jesus was substituted for men?—This concept of substitution is implied by some of St. Paul’s expressions where the ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν could be translated “in our place” rather than “in favor of.” Similarly, Jn. 1:29 (ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου) can be translated both as “He who takes upon himself” and “He who takes away” the sin of the world. This takes us back to the prophecy of Yahweh’s Servant, which seems to have played an important role in the primitive understanding and preaching of the passion.

However, in order to apply such a concept to Christ, we need to avoid the ancient idea of the animal immolated and offered in place of men, deflecting anger and punishment onto itself, the “scapegoat” concentrating upon itself the wrath hanging over the heads of all. Rather, it is a question of solidarity between Christ and mankind. The concept of representation is too weak and too juridical to express this. Christ does not take the place of each of us merely through an external designation, a delegation. It’s not even merely a personal act of assuming responsibility, although such voluntary assumption of responsibility is absolutely essential. To understand what we are getting at here, we must turn to the mystery of the Incarnation. If God became man, what He wished to “assume,” “to make his own” was the whole of human nature—and with it each individual human being—in order to fill it, though also to take on its condition and destiny before God. The Fathers of the Church gave this idea as much ontological force as they could, broadly developing the Irenaean idea of recapitulation. It was in this sense that St. Thomas interpreted the Pauline idea of Christ as head of mankind and, thereby, acting on its behalf. “The head and the members are like a single mystical person”⁷: “And this is why the works of Christ relate both to Him and to His members, just as the works of another man established in grace relate to himself.”⁸

If Christ dies for us, this is first of all because he exists as a man for us. The modern formula of Jesus as “a man for others” has its full meaning only as a consequence of the formula of faith: “God became man for us men and for our salvation.” And then, yes, the word “for” has its full force: not just “in favor of,” not even merely “in place of,” but “in the name of,” or better still, “as the head of,” as leader, voice, and expression of the human race as such, of each and every one of us.

II. – The Two “Paths” for Approaching the Mystery of Redemption

In light of these clarifications, we must now interpret the two types of reflection that have alternately—and often simultaneously—enabled Christian thought to explain how Christ’s death was able to save us from both death and sin. Either we make the liberation and transformation of sinful, mortal humanity—man’s divinization—the very consequence of the Incarnation of the Word and His assumption of all that is human—passion and death included—or we consider in the Word made flesh the human acts by which He glorified the Father on behalf of all humanity, thereby bringing about man’s total and perfect reconciliation with God, and thus his divinization.

The first approach has been called the physical theory of redemption. The term was so used, first of all, by giving the word “physical” its etymological meaning: the redemption of nature as such by the very fact of its assumption by the Word. However, it also considers the redemptive acts of the Incarnate Word as effective, effectively transforming mankind. Perhaps the best word to use here, like that which we use for the Body that we are for Christ, would be “mystical.” On account of the efficacy of the Cross, insofar as it manifests itself in the destruction of opposing forces and the conquest of a state of freedom, peace, and triumph, the redemption appears in this first perspective as being the victory of Christ. However, as we shall see, this idea is just as manifest in the second way.

This second path could be called moral in the sense that the category of the “moral” is no longer that of nature but of freedom, no longer of efficiency but of the value for good or evil, and therefore, before God, that of human acts. From this perspective, one thus envisions the moral value of Christ’s human life and death in their value as an offering to God. Although discernible from the earliest attempts to explain Christ’s passion and death, it was not until St. Anselm that this approach really found its theological status and systematic form.

When approached the first way, the Redemption appears above all as an act of God through and on humanity. From the second, it appears as an act by man addressing God. Thus: “Christ’s passion, if related to His divinity, acts by mode of efficient causality; if related to Christ’s human will, it acts by mode of merit; if related to Christ’s flesh, it acts by mode of satisfaction.”⁹ This gives us a “descending” conception of Redemption and an “ascending” one, but we must take care not to oppose them to each other, as this would distort both: in reality, they mutually call for each other.

We will not trace these two approaches or paths of Christian thought through their variations, vicissitudes, and diverse forms of expression. However attentive we may be to their history, and however instructed we may be by such history, nonetheless, because they are based on the nature of things and are intimately intertwined in Saint Paul, let us try to grasp them in their essentials, developing them on that basis through a renewed and re-actualized reflection, which accepts the weaknesses and strengths of being personal, not without seeking to overcome the criticisms that may have been levelled against both of these approaches.

1. The First Path

The idea that human nature is divinized in its principle and source by the very fact that God became man played a pivotal role in patristic theology. “Divinization” here means participation in the divine nature, in other words grace, though it is so great a participation that it enables man to lead a divine life—or, rather, the very life of God. Of course, human nature does not exist as such in isolation but, rather, is uniquely and incommunicably individualized in each human person, above all in the person of Christ. Now, what is immediately divinized by the Incarnation is the individual nature of Jesus: not that his human nature would cease to be human but, rather, this means that this nature receives from its substantial union with the Word an absolute fullness of grace that makes it the exemplar, source, and principle of all that is grace. And if it is true that no participation in this fullness is possible without the personal adherence of faith, it is also true that before any faith and any gift of grace, it merely suffices that one be a man, that one belong to the human species, in order to be, in potency, a member of Christ and a participant in the divinization of man in him. Therefore, one can rightly say that every human being, because he is human, bears in germ, or rather as a truly proposed project, the image of God as it is in Jesus Christ. However, the Church Fathers never separated the idea of divinization from that of immortality. To participate in the life of God is to participate in the Being who is par excellence beyond all decline, suffering, and death. However Platonic they may seem in many respects, they always held that human death was not a liberation of the divine spark, but a violence done to what is divine in man, a dramatic change in the primitive human condition originally intended by the Creator. In their thought and language, immortality, eternal life, means life of God, in God, with God. Human death—and, first and foremost, sin in its very nature—is the loss of this very life. If the Incarnation is redemptive and not merely divinizing, this is because it delivers human nature from its mortal destiny by delivering it from its state of death.

However, let us not be too hasty. Becoming a man is not just a question of being conceived in a woman’s womb. It is concerned with entering into time, beginning to become, to progressively realize oneself, starting to live a life history that’s even more interior than exterior. It takes an entire human life to assume all that makes us human, to become this unique man for all eternity. But everything Christ experienced as human, He divinized; He made it a moment, a state, at once fully human and entirely ordered toward God, infused with divine spirituality and destined for full bloom. And by divinizing human life in Himself, Christ divinized it for all, always with the personal participation of each individual. Lived by God made man, everything in the human being that is a limit, pain, obstacle, and failure, is at the same time and by the same stroke vanquished, abolished, and destined for ultimate triumph.

But, in order to be fully human and to divinize all that is human, human life alone will not suffice. To accomplish and bring it to consummation, one must come to death, a death begun and announced in the very temporality of human existence. Let us here take death, like all the diminutions and passivities that precede it, only as something natural: which it is, in any case, since the original fall is man’s fall back into what is solely natural. And let us take the evils of humanity as natural, while at the same time multiplied ad infinitum by the history of a sinful nature. This is what God, in becoming man, assumes and wants to live.

Here we find ourselves faced with a new mystery. That Christ should die is necessary, since He assumed our mortal condition. But that He should remain in death is impossible, for the union of His human being with His divinity excludes it. It is not only in His human soul that He is divinized, but in His entire being as human. He passes through death to be like us. But because it is God made man who passes through death, He transforms the meaning of human death, changing it, metamorphosing it into resurrection. It is so little a substitution that each of us will also have to go through death, but a death quite different from purely human death. Up to this point, the death of the living was used to give life to another living being: a miracle that has never ceased to amaze, and is often adored by mankind, of nature reborn year after year, of life always beginning anew! But from now on, the death of a living being gives rise to the life of the same living being, though transformed and at last fully becoming what it was in seed. “Unless the seed dies,” says Jesus, speaking of His own death, “it bears no fruit” (Jn. 12:24). This is an image that St. Paul will use to help us understand what our own resurrection will be (1 Cor. 15:37-38). However, it is in Jesus’s death that the resurrecting power that the Incarnation placed in human nature is fulfilled. And there we see the full force of its redeeming virtue, its victorious power over death: “I will be your death, O death!”¹⁰

Jesus’ death was brought about through the cruelest and most unjust aspects of death, suffering, violence and hatred, manifesting itself in all its absurdity, like the absolute scandal of nature devouring the purest marvel to have emerged from it. This fact gives the triumph over the enemy power, the abolition that this triumph promises, and the path to life that it opens to all, a strength and universality that would not have found so powerful an expression were He to have serenely died as a patriarch having lived the full measure of His days.

But human death is not “natural.” And a fortiori its cruelty and the violence that provoked it. It would be natural if man had only been intended as the supreme outcome of the corruptible nature from which he sprang. However, he was created in divinizing grace and for a life lived according to that grace. All of his flesh received from this original ordination, as something passing into his nature, a freedom from the forces of death, and upon the loss of his original grace, he was deprived of this. Now, we cannot know what would have been the nature of the victory that would have been exercised over death by a being who remained corruptible in himself and linked to an entirely corruptible world. The whole of Tradition has thought that, had man not sinned sin, he would not have died, in the physical and metaphysical sense of the word, that his flesh would not have been abandoned by his soul, and therefore that when each person’s human life had come to an end, all would have been, in some mysterious and unimaginable way, transferred entirely to that beyond of the visible world, to that transfigured state where the vision of God is possible. However, we must understand this within the perspective we have outlined: death is understood as the loss of a life that participates in God’s life, a life according to the Spirit, “pneumatic.” Immortality is essentially the permanence of being with God and in God, involving no rupture with beings remaining in time. And death could not be called “death” in the sense that this term has for us, if it were experienced—even in the most instinctive forces of the psyche and the flesh—as the blossoming of life and a simple change of relationship with the world, if it were not the effect of violence, the absolute violence by nature upon the spirit, but rather a kind of maturation. Saint Paul sheds light on this when he defines sin as being itself a death, a loss of divine life, as creating a state of death for which physical, violent death is less so a punishment than the consequence and translation. Yes, the consequence of this desertion of divine life, which is the absence of grace in all those born of Adam according to the flesh, takes on the appearance of an annihilation of the spirit, a total victory over it by the forces of matter, a rupture with all that exists, a violence done to the soul, which by itself is powerless bring about any life whatsoever. We should not be surprised that Paul seems to consider such death to be a positive force, a force to be destroyed, that of nature itself, abandoned by the Spirit. And thus, too, it is not shocking that he says that, in order to destroy it in us, we must destroy sin, the immanent cause of death, let us even say its beginning, “the sting of death is sin” (1 Cor. 15:56), indeed, destroying it first and foremost as a deprivation of God, which is what the return of grace does, but also—which the return of grace does not do immediately and all at once—as an ontological reality, as an internal force of self-possession and de-divinization, and therefore as a force of concupiscence and disobedience. All this poorly express what St. Paul means to express by personifying sin, as he personifies death, as “the last enemy” (15:26): as some kind of force by which we are attached ourselves and to that which is not God, a force which is the very law of that which is only flesh, a force which holds captive the spirit and impotent freedom. If Jesus destroys human death by passing through it in order to rise from it, this is first of all because he destroys within human nature this force of sin inscribed thereupon, a force that by itself pushes on to death since it is attachment to the corruptible, finite, and temporal.

Hence, we can understand what St. Paul means when he speaks of Jesus’ death as a death to life according to the flesh, to the law, to the world, indeed, to everything that enslaves man and draws him away from life according to God. To “die to” means to lose a certain form of life, and if this takes place without ceasing to exist and to be oneself, then such death is to be born to another form of life, whether inferior or superior. By dying physically, by the biological dissolution of his being, man dies at the same time to life according to the flesh, for which such physical death is the natural outcome—for “the flesh tends towards death” (Rom. 8:6)—but he is not thereby born to life according to “the Spirit” which “tends towards life and peace” (ibid.). Jesus, by contrast, can only die in regard to physical life; in him, there was never found any life “according to the flesh.” Thus, He does not die for Himself, but for us. Far from being a requirement of His inner state and the very outcome of his living, death represents a form of absolute violence against him. His flesh is not the flesh of sin. However, it is similar to our sinful flesh, in the grip of sin, whose mortal condition He has assumed (Rom. 8:3). If He dies for us, His death, insofar as it is our death, is death to the flesh, to the law, to the world: “sin was condemned in the flesh” (ibid.), which means that the power of sin died through Christ’s body. Consequently, life according to the Spirit is born for us from His death. And thus, before participating in Christ’s death through our physical death, we must participate in it through what, following St. Paul, we have called death to the world, the flesh, and ourselves, the death of the “old man”: a death from which must spring, through faith and baptism, a new life, a new man, and already the beginning of the resurrection. Through the subtle interplay of the various meanings or levels of death—an interplay entirely based on the idea of death as absolute separation from that which gives life—let us recall a few famous verses which suffice to establish this doctrine: “With Christ I am one crucified; I live, but it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19–20); “Since we have died to sin, how can we still live in sin? Or are you unaware that all of us, baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death? By baptism into His death we were buried with him, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might lead a new life” (Rom. 6:2-4); “You have been put to death with regard to the law, through the body of Christ” (Rom. 7, 4). But, it is perhaps in 2 Cor. 5:14 that we find the most concise and forceful expression of what we have tried to express here: “One has died for all, and therefore all have died,” a death that is defined in relation to a life according to the flesh, a death which leads into a life according to the Spirit, that of the risen one.¹¹

This interpretation of salvation through Christ’s death rests entirely on the solidarity that the Incarnation has created between Christ and mankind. In fact, “solidarity” is an understatement: it is a communion, an “admirable exchange,” or some would say, a mystical identification. However, the word “mystical” (mysterious, mysterical) deprives the word “identification” of its full rigor, implying something halfway between the intentional and the real. Saint Paul, for his part, uses the most audacious expressions to say that everything Christ experienced, we have experienced “with him—and all that remains is for us to make it our own. Life in the flesh, death, resurrection: Christ carries us within Himself when He accomplishes these mysteries, and if we can make them our own through the sacraments and their reproduction in our own life and death, this is because of the first and fundamental mystery of the presence of the whole of human nature in Jesus through the very fact of the Incarnation. Christ’s passion and death, precisely because the one who undergoes—or, rather, assumes—them is God made man for mankind, themselves become the exemplar, and as it were the first, typical, and causal realization of the ascent of human nature towards its completion—its salvation!—through pain, effort, and even death. An acting exemplar, conforming us to Himself by His own action, by His own power as Risen One.

And here, we join St. Thomas, who does not remain content to speak of this kind of mystical identification of Christ with each and every human being, and a kind of virtual presence of each of us in the One who lived and died for us. Rather, remaining faithful to the thought of St. Cyril, held that the flesh assumed and inhabited by the Word is the life-giving flesh, Thomas holds that Christ’s humanity—insofar as it has passed through all the mysteries of His life in the flesh, His passion, and His death, and as such having entered into the state of resurrection—the very instrument of our divinization. He asks himself: Do Christ’s passion and death act as efficient causes of our salvation? And he answers: “all of Christ’s actions and passions act for our salvation as an instrument of divinity.”¹² Indeed, even more universally, as regards the Resurrection, he says: “all that Christ did and underwent in His humanity is a cause of salvation for us by virtue of his divinity.”¹³ What remains of Christ’s earthly life is the humanity in which He lived it, glorified but forever individualized by what He did and underwent, acting in the course of time, operating in us through the contact of faith and the sacraments. And what this humanity brings about in us, acting as the instrument of the Word, is the very reproduction of the mystery it accomplished for us, in our name, as a substitute for the whole of human nature.

2. The Second Path

If the first path is above all the path from God to man, the second will be the path from man to God. Redemptive acts will appear to us as human acts, the free acts of Jesus, those whose moral and spiritual value has the power to incline the heart of God, or rather that of the Father, towards mankind, and thereby bring about mankind’s salvation.

1. Jesus’ soul in His passion and death

In speaking here of Christ’s human activity, I am not concerned with it as the bearer of divine efficacy—that is what the first approach, just discussed, considered—but, rather, as a human and free act, with God as its object, performed in the name of all men, and endowed with its own moral value. Even when considered in this way, these acts are those of a Divine Person who commits Himself in them and through them, giving them by this very fact an infinite bearing, though leaving them all their human character. It is indeed the Word who suffers and dies, who loves and offers, but he does this precisely as the Word-become-man, in the human nature He has assumed without distorting it. And because He is the Word, the Son, these human acts, which are His own acts, are certainly addressed to God, though in the Person of the Father. The Son’s eternal relationship with the Father is incarnated in a relationship of human obedience. For Christ’s entire human will is free, though it is united with the divine will in a single “willing”: and this is the meaning of His life, His passion, His death, and even His resurrection: “The Father loves me because I lay down my life to take it up again” (Jn. 10:17). The Johannine Jesus—by which I mean the Jesus John introduces us to—is entirely and in all things dominated by the communion that exists between His will and that of his Father: “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to accomplish his work,” words which He speaks at a moment when the immense scope of His mission (“the fields are ripe for the harvest”) and His role as sower seem to appear more forcefully in His human conscience (Jn. 4:34ff). And it is from a similar perspective that He compares Himself, this time, to the seed itself dying in the earth in order to bear fruit, and then crying out, “Father, preserve me from this hour, but it is for this hour that I have come. Father, glorify your name” (Jn. 12:27–28). This brings to minds the words of Gethsemane: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me! Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Mt. 26:39). And when the Hour comes, He will be able to say: “Father, I have glorified you on earth; I have finished the work you gave me to do” (Jo. 17:4). Likewise, when He rises from the Last Supper to go to His passion, He explains what is taking place thus: “The Prince of this world is coming. But He is coming so that the world may know that I love my Father, and that I do what the Father has commanded me” (Jn. 14:30–31). All the Passion narratives present Him in this state of abandonment into the hands of the Father. And St. Paul will not only forcefully reiterate that He died out of obedience but, also, that this obedience is what earned Him glory and power (cf. Phil. 2:8–9) and that it made His passion and death “a work of justice” that justifies us and gives us life, so that just as “through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so too through one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:18ff). And the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “upon entering the world,” from the very first impulse of His human will, He said: “Behold, I have come to do your will” (Heb. 10:5-9). Such obedience is, in fact, the human form taken on by the love that unites the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Thus, for Jesus, obedience to the Father’s will means embracing it, making it His own, right down to its motives and spontaneity. This is why Saint Thomas says that “the Father inspired Jesus to die for us.”¹⁴ And he clarifies: thus, in this sense, we can speak of a precept to die that held for Jesus; and if the Father delivers Jesus to death, it is just as true to say that Jesus gave Himself up.¹⁵ This begins with the Incarnation itself. The willing of the Incarnation is, of course, properly divine (“my Father has sent me”), but Christ’s human will itself consents to this unheard-of fact that this human nature and will belong to a divine Person. It is entirely directed towards those for whom the Incarnation is willed. Jesus wills, with all his will, to be man like others and for others, to belong to them and serve them. When we say that Christ voluntarily assumed the defects of human nature (that is, all that is vulnerable and mortal in it), the word “voluntarily” applies just as much to His human will as to His divine will. And the same is true for every aspect of His mission. In His human heart, indwelt and inspired by the Spirit, He loves the people whom the Father has given Him to love as the Father loves them, offering Himself—as God, but now as a vulnerable man—to the free response of people, which for some went as far as hatred. He loved Israel with the love with which Yahweh loved His people—“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you; how often I have wished to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you have been unwilling” (Lk. 13:24)—with that privileged love, disappointed, refused, or betrayed, spoken of by the Bible in anthropomorphic terms which all of the sudden find themselves verified in their proper sense when Yahweh, in the person of the Son, becomes man. This is what the Reproaches of the Good Friday liturgy¹⁶ so movingly express.

And so, when we ask whether Jesus willed His passion and death, we must answer that He willed them as God Himself willed them, with a will that was the pure echo, in His human being, of the divine saving will, making His own the divine plan in all its breadth and the very love that is expressed in that very plan: “The Father shows [the Son] everything he does... and what the Father does, the Son does likewise” (Jn. 5:19–20). By making His apostles friends rather than servants, Jesus communicates to them the secret of His obedience to the Father (cf. Jn. 15:15). Jesus did not, therefore, directly desire His Passion or His death. We might even say that He took precautions (the poor, humble precautions of a lowly one in this world) to escape His adversaries. He had to be handed over, “given,” by a friend, by Judas, in order to be arrested, and then caught up in the drama as it unfolded. But what He willed directly, from the moment the Father’s will was made manifest in His human consciousness, was to assume the ministry of the word—“I have accomplished the work you gave me to do... I have made your name known to the men you gave me from the midst of the world” (Jn. 17:4,6)—of a bold and complete word, addressed first of all to the people of the Promise and their leaders, seeking to take root in Jerusalem and from there to launch forth into the world. As the faithful witness— “He who sent me is true, and what I have heard from him I declare to the world” (Jn. 17:26)—“come to bear witness to the truth” (Jn. 18:37), to the truth that alone can free and save man (cf. ibid. 8:32), as a light seeking to shine in the darkness that sought to snuff it out, He exposed Himself to passion and death, not seeking that His mission founder disastrously but, rather, risking it so as not to betray it, and thus willing, as the Father willed, not death but the gift of Himself to the death that came to Him and that would enable Him to go much further in the salvation of men than He would by His word alone. His total and free fidelity to this will to be truly man, to espouse human weakness, a willing included in the economy of the Incarnation, to save mankind through this very weakness is seen in all the weaknesses he assumed: in his consent, not without heart-rending complaint, to surrender His human being, body and soul, to the forces of evil that were descending upon Him; in the fact that He received no exceptional help from His own divinity, or from His Father, to resist such betrayal and violence; in that fact that He did not ask His Father for legions of angels to rescue him (cf. Mt. 26:53); in the fact that He was left truly powerless to come down from the cross even as He was challenged to do (cf. Mt. 27:42ff), and even powerless to overcome the hardness and cowardice of unconscious sinners by his human word and obvious innocence. All this was a weakness that was more than human, the weakness of the most abandoned of human beings, fully embraced by His human will. He surrendered himself to this failure, to this passion and death as they came to him, to give them the power that His earthly life and words no longer had. This sovereign freedom with which He gave His life is strongly emphasized by Saint John: “No one takes my life from me, but I give my life of my own free will” (Jn. 10:18). And indeed, however mortally wounded He was on the cross, His death was a free act by which He surrendered His soul to the Father—a death that is no less human, though exemplarily human.

Therefore, it is quite impossible to think that in His human soul Jesus would not have been aware of what was to take place through His death. We do not even need to call on extraordinary insights to explain why He could have announced His passion in advance. Everything in the Gospel accounts evokes the heavy atmosphere that prepared the drama of Good Friday, everything shows that the hostility of the Jews was reaching its extreme point of tension, that His ascent to Jerusalem at Passover time was a challenge. According to Saint Luke, He had to “set firm His face” (9:51) in order to risk it, and Thomas the Apostle, after having initially tried to dissuade Him, exclaims, “Let us also go and die with Him” (Jn. 11:16). However, such precision regarding all such details, and above all the announcement of the resurrection on the third day, must be attributed to something other than admirable but human lucidity (cf. Jn. 2:25, “He knew what was in man”). A simply "prophetic" light is certainly enough to explain it, and it could have not been given from the outset. It may even have been limited to illuminating that human meditation on the Scriptures which seems to have so profoundly marked Jesus’ earthly life that it was seen as being fulfilled “according to the Scriptures”—as though the Father’s will had been manifested to him through the Scriptures, read and understood from within, in the light of the Word expressed therein. To say this is not to give too much credit to the human, groping, progressively enlightened nature of Jesus’ truly human consciousness, the true steps of his freedom. But what Jesus could not have failed to know and to will from the moment He entered the world, before any human meditation, before any revelation of circumstances and moments, was that He was given, delivered body and soul and without limits, for the salvation of mankind, that He had no reason for His existence in His humanity other than as a servant of the divine willing of salvation through the Incarnation. How could He have been humanly conscious of being the Incarnate Word without at the same time being conscious of existing for mankind without limit or measure? And how could we believe that He is the Incarnate Word and doubt that He was humanly aware of it? This awareness is what Saint John manifests to us on every page of His Gospel. And supposing that the moments and circumstances of the “Hour for which He had come” gradually became apparent to Him, it never ceased to be present in His mind as the hour when His earthly life would find its consummation. This does not mean, certainly, that when it became clear that, through the fault of men, the acceptance of death was the only way to realize the divine will of salvation, that the natural movement of Christ’s human will was not one of horror and rejection. Did we not already note the fact that God Himself did not will this directly? Rather, the choice was made to overcome everything for the sake of the divine will to save mankind, which was also His human will.

Therefore, it was with full awareness and consent in His human soul that Christ offered Himself up to His passion and death. “He loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). In what seemed to be the failure of his work, He recognized the means to accomplish it more perfectly, more divinely than He could have done by the power of His word and miracles alone.

And it was because of the role they could play in the salvation of mankind that the death and passion of Jesus were not directly willed and, so to speak, programmed but, rather, permitted and consented to by God in His eternity and by Jesus in time itself. But, all that the “second way” sought to explain is what value could they have for our salvation and what dimension could they give it, is. It is the second way, because it is concerned with what Jesus did and underwent as a man, in order to offer it to the Father. “Merit,” “satisfaction”: these are the terms—very poor in comparison to the admirable richness of their content—that have sought to designate the salvific value of the human acts of the Incarnate Word in His passion and death.

2. The Meritorious value of Christ’s passion and death

Above all, we must quote the few dense and clear sentences with which Saint Thomas begins his explanation of “the way in which Christ’s passion brought about our salvation” (ST III, q. 48):

Grace was given to Christ not only as an individual person, but as the head of the Church, so that from Him it might flow into His members. This is why Christ’s works relate both to Himself and to His members, just as the works of another man established in grace relate to himself. Now it is clear that whoever is established in grace and suffers for the sake of righteousness thereby merits salvation for himself… Thus, Christ, through His passion, merited salvation, not only for Himself, but for all His members.¹⁷

And this will be made clear in the next article, on the subject of satisfaction, to which we shall return: “The head and the members form a single mystical person, and Christ’s satisfaction extends to all the faithful as well as to his members.”¹⁸ By suffering an unjust death, Jesus merited the exaltation of His resurrection. If He rose in glory, this was not only because, belonging substantially to the Word of God and filled with his grace, His human being could not remain in death. It is also because, by the very merit of His acceptance of death, of the offering He made of it, he conquered His glory. More profoundly, it is through His human will’s fulfillment of His divine that He is led to the “fulfillment” of His being through the resurrection. And because He is the head, because the grace which is the principle of His merit has been given to Him for the whole of human nature, which He bears within Himself, because He forms with all His members, “as it were, a mystical person,” what He merits for Himself by the force of this grace He merits for man, for men: namely the resurrection, eternal life, and thereby the grace of conversion, the transfiguration of human life, divinization. In Jesus, it is Man who has had the conquest of His entry into glory through the merit of Him being painful wrenched from earthly life: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself” (Jn. 12:32). Of course, it could be argued that Christ’s every act is done in our name, and that He alone therefore merits everything for the infinite value of His charity. But this would be to misunderstand what merit is: the permanent, ongoing enhancement of a person’s worth through his or her transient acts. I am, I become, what I have made of myself through my freedom throughout my life. A human life is a whole that unfolds over time. It is much less an additive accumulation of acts than it is a finally completed totality. This totality, this fulfillment of God’s will in all its fullness, completely performing His designs, is what Jesus was aiming at through the least of His acts. And death, for Jesus, was not the destruction of being but, rather, the supreme act of grasping anew of His entire earthly life in an act of offering and love, in an act of return to the Father. It was an act which, in itself, calls for, merits, and obtains that other life, this other mode of living which will be the resurrection—and all the more powerfully because the death in question was in itself violent, cruel, unjust, and because this injustice and cruelty were pushed to the extreme by the wickedness of men. Suffering and humiliation, unjustly suffered but accepted for the sake of justice, give a more imperious, more dazzling right to all the more happiness and glory, and death to all the more life. And this right becomes ours. Understood this way, the merit of Christ’s human acts obtains for us what, according to the first way discussed above, appeared to be the very effect of the Incarnation of the Word. Thus, Christ’s acts have this twofold virtue: on the one hand, they divinize us by the very force of the deity at work within us; on the other, they merit this divinization by the very value of free human acts performed in our name. What we are expressing by means of extremely elaborate concepts, expresses nothing other than what is found in the very remarkable text of the Letter to the Hebrews (2:9–10): “Jesus, because of the death he suffered, is crowned with glory and honor. Thus, by the grace of God, it was for every man that He tasted death. Indeed, it was fitting for the One for whom and through whom everything exists, and who wanted to lead a multitude of sons to glory, to lead the initiator of their salvation to fulfillment through suffering.” This fulfillment, this consummation of a being in its end, is what merit obtains. In the case of Christ, such fulfillment is nothing other than His glory, that is, His humanity’s full participation in His divinity, the glory in which we are to share. If He is the pioneer of our salvation, this is because salvation, divinization, begins in Him and ends in us. Salvation is obtained by his suffering and death, for Him and for us.

And since to merit is to make oneself worthy of God’s love by one’s own actions, it was by His human actions—those of His whole life, but ultimately and super-excellently, by His obedience to the point of death and His love to the end—that Jesus acted as the beloved of the Father, and all of us in Him. “Just as through one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so too through one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19).

3. The Satisfying Value of Christ’s Passion and Death

The fact that Christ’s love and obedience, which have their supreme act in His passion and death, merited glory, first for Himself and then for us, is fundamentally what the first Christian faithful perceived above all in the Easter triumph: the risen Jesus appeared to them as the persecuted Righteous One whom God fills with His gifts, up to the very measure of His suffering, the persecuted and justified Righteous One whose justice and unheard-of reward become ours. And we might be tempted to explain it all in terms of the power of merit: the cross having been accepted and assumed by Jesus as a consequence of what He necessarily had to say and be, but by that very fact becoming, and in our name, the supreme achievement of justice and love. However, does this sufficiently account for the confession of faith, “having died for our sins,” which St. Paul will develop in every possible way? “Delivered up for our sins (Rm 4:24); “all have sinned, are deprived of the glory of God, but are freely justified by his grace, in virtue of the redemption accomplished in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 3:23). The great and marvelous prologue to the Letter to the Ephesians, which proclaims our predestination before all ages in Jesus Christ to be holy and spotless before God, does not omit the following clause, which is the condition of all the rest: “in Him, through His blood, we are delivered, in Him our faults are forgiven” (Eph. 1:7–8). Even when expressed in terms of victory and efficiency, as putting sins to death through the cross, nonetheless what is first and foremost at stake in a text like this is His forgiveness: “God has given you life with Him. He has forgiven us all our sins. He has annulled the accusing document which the commandments turned against us. He has made it disappear and has nailed it to the cross. He has stripped Authorities and Powers and has publicly made a spectacle of them. He has dragged them into the triumphal procession of the cross” (Col. 2:13–15). Need we recall how the blood that was shed is likened to a ransom, to a price that had to be paid to bring men into the Kingdom, so that they might belong to Christ? We thus have the word “redemption,” now specifically connected to Christ’s saving act. “There is only one God, only one mediator between God and men, one man, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:5-6).

However, more importantly, and more profoundly, the idea of reconciliation through the cross means that God’s love is only restored to man through a reconciling act, canceling out the separation that is caused by sin. “While we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son” (Rom. 5:10). “It was God who, in Christ, reconciled the world to Himself, not counting men’s faults against them…” (2 Cor. 5:18). And then St. Paul cries out: “Let yourselves be reconciled to God” (ibid., 5:20), making His role as apostle, his embassy, consist in the proclamation of a word of reconciliation, though one that is founded entirely on the cross of Christ: “Everything comes from God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Christ and entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation” (ibid., 5:18). The perspectives are broadened in the letter to the Ephesians and Colossians, for what is involved here is universal reconciliation, a return of all things to unity in Christ. However, this is indeed the effect of Christ’s blood shed on the cross, and it is in His crucified body, handed over to death but raised, that this reunification takes place. And it is here that we read an admirable passage whose human and cosmic scope must not obscure the fact that the return of all things to God requires the abolition of sin: “For it pleased God to make all fullness dwell in Him, and to reconcile all things through Him and for Him, on earth and in heaven, having established peace through the blood of His cross. And you who were once strangers, whose evil deeds showed deep hostility, behold, now God has reconciled you in the perishable body of his Son, through his death, to make you appear before Him holy, blameless, and unassailable” (Col. 1:19-22).

And is John saying anything other than this when he points to Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?” (Jn. 1:29), or when He writes, “he is the victim of atonement for our sins; and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world” (1 Jn. 2:2). And are not Paul’s own words found in the Christian Eucharist which speaks of “the blood of the Covenant, shed for the many for the remission of sins” (Mt. 26:28)? He would say, for his own part, more briefly but just as forcefully: “this cup is the new Covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:25).

And how could we fail to see behind this entire doctrine, intensely present in early Christian preaching, an echo of the fourth song of Yahweh’s Suffering Servant: “…our sufferings He bore, our sorrows He was burdened with... He offers His life as an atoning sacrifice” (Is. 53:4, 10). This is undoubtedly the inspiration behind texts like the following in Paul: “...by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:14); “(God) made Him sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21). We have the clear idea concerning substitution for the sinner, the full meaning given to the word “for (ὑπέρ)”: no longer merely in our favor, but in our place, in our name, so that His suffering atones for and destroys our faults, and so that, if one wishes to remain content with merit alone, this merit, before obtaining our glory and in order to be able to do so, must obtain and achieve the remission of our sins. The task of any true theology of Redemption is to bring to light what greater depths such a revelation uncovers for us in human suffering, in Christ’s suffering, in His love. But this is precisely where it encounters the densest part of the mystery, where it must be infinitely respectful of what it may not be able to fully understand and justify.

4. The mystery of sin and guilt

This is undoubtedly what should be understood first when we speak of redemption. The meaning of sin presupposes, so to speak, the meaning of God. Sin is human freedom withdrawing from God, making itself the center, rule, and end of its own projects. By the same stroke, it is from his own end and fulfillment that man withdraws when he sins. In so doing, he destroys himself and brings about his own misfortune, less as a punishment than as a consequence of His separation from God. But in its essence, even before being evil and man’s death, sin is evil as an opposition to God, as a denial and rejection of God, a rejection inflicted in relation to the One who gives Himself to man. The word “God’s offense” is anthropomorphic, like the words “divine anger” or “divine jealousy.” What it means—and this is the truth that it indeed does contain—is that sin reaches to God insofar as He is God. By its very nature, it is the very opposite of what God is as infinite goodness and the source of all good. The order it destroys is that of love, and the values it negates are those which have God as their foundation.

Admittedly, this is normally implicit and only included in the search for one’s absolute and primary self. Granted. But to say that man is incapable of choosing himself in this way, to claim to reduce his revolts, his egoisms, his pride, his hatred of others, his deliberate will to power and pleasure, to mere weakness or the deterministic causes, is to misunderstand the depth and value of human freedom. And to recognize it and take it into account is to preserve it and, therefore, to preserve what is best and most divine in man.

And nonetheless, there is something about sin that goes beyond what is conscious and intentional about it, even though this is part of it. We must turn to the spiritual experience of mystics to understand what I am speaking of here. Because they were intensely aware of being images of God and made for God, they perceived with anguish and horror the distance that separates from the Divine Being anyone who has sinned, or even anyone who feels that he is, in his depths, under the grip of the power of sin. To them, the divine transcendence appeared not as an infinite absence but, rather, as the impossible yet ardently desired union of opposites. This sin, more extensive than the sins that each of us may be personally guilty, is original sin and the power of sin that it generates and leaves in us. It may also be the sin of the world. Far be it from me to cast doubt on original sin and reduce its mysterious reality to being only the first sin. It is indeed the only sin to have separated nature as such from God, this nature originally created in grace—and undoubtedly with it the entire material universe of this ordered nature. But the law of solidarity, which first came into play in original sin, is to be found throughout the history of sin. All sin—and this is part of man’s very nature, his social and interpersonal nature—affects the group to which the sinner belongs; it contributes to creating a state of disorder in the human world, affecting the very structures of a culture and a society; it is communicated and multiplied from generation to generation; and, if we look not only at human nature by itself but also at human nature in society, the human city, the cultural milieu in which every human being is born and lives, human evil is not only that which comes from Adam by the mere fact of being born of it, but that which accumulates from generation to generation, which, in the words of Saint Paul, “has exceedingly abounded so that with Christ grace may exceedingly abound too” (Rom. 5:20).

Have we sufficiently noted the extent to which Redemption was initially conceived in terms of Adam’s sin, through which death entered the world? Now, as a “sin of nature,” it is guilty only in the one who committed it, in Adam. In us, it appears above all as misfortune and separation from God, as a tendency to evil, as a source of death, but much less as personal guilt, as a fault to be repaired. This is very clear in the “physical” theory of redemption, which explains redemption above all as deliverance from death and all the evils of the human condition. True indeed, death has been called a punishment and a just punishment, which may have led to it being regarded as a debt to be paid by humankind. Without repudiating this vocabulary, Saint Thomas makes its meaning singularly clearer by defining this punishment as being the return of human nature to its natural nakedness, and by making it the very consequence of Adam’s voluntary loss of original grace.

However, there has been a noticeable shift in theology, which has increasingly focused on personal sins to explain the saving role of Christ’s passion and death. In reality, this was a return to the sources. When St. Paul describes man’s sinful condition, he is mainly talking about personal sins, even though he points to their source in the “power of sin” dwelling in our flesh and, ultimately, in Adam’s sin. “All have sinned,” he cries, “and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). And it is obviously personal sins, the sins of each individual, that are front and center in the remission of sins announced by Jesus and then by the apostles, in the call to conversion and reconciliation that is inseparable from the good news of the resurrection and the Kingdom.

Moreover, for him who committed the first sin, this sin was indeed personal and responsible. The Fathers of the Church, following in the footsteps of St. Irenaeus, laid great stress on the salvation of Adam and Eve. Who does not recall the admirable icon depicting Christ descending into hell and extending His saving hand to Adam plunged into the depths of the abyss? And when we take into account what one today calls “sin of the world”¹⁹ must not reduce it to a state for which no one is responsible, other than an elusive and impersonal collective. Undoubtedly, there have been, and still are, great sinners in human history, in the human city, who are never alone in responsible for what they are and do; nonetheless, they remain truly the creators and initiators of a new evil or of a relentless recrudescence of evil—those through whom the scandal comes. Moreover, there is the consent of each individual to this evil which invades him on all sides, but which he assumes for his part. If original sin swells forth and develops into the sin of the world like a torrent, the sin of the world itself would not exist and could not be called sin if it were not for personal sin, to varying degrees and in multiple forms: personal sin, which is first and foremost each person’s assumption of original sin and the sin of the world, each person’s actualization of a virtual solidarity, and already each person’s increase in the mass of sin that carries with itself the whole of human history.

In any case, it is a fact that the Christian faith has increasingly seen Jesus crucified as the one who forgives me for what I've done wrong, and who justifies me, who makes me just, starting with this injustice, the source of which I carry within myself, but which is only reproached to me if I make it my own. Asking whether Christ came first for original sin or first for personal sins, Saint Thomas replies that, considering the extent of the evil that is original sin, it is indeed the greatest evil, calling even more strongly for salvation. But if we consider the seriousness and intensity of the evil, then it is indeed in personal sins, which alone are willed and responsible, that evil is the most serious and, therefore, calls more strongly for redemption.²⁰

The role of Jesus’ cross in relation to original sin and its consequences is never forgotten. However, sin has come to be seen more and more as a free and responsible act by each individual, the principle of which, though inscribed in the flesh, is still our mysterious unity with “Adam.” Perhaps this change in perspective is also reflected in the greater attention that Christian meditation pays to Christ’s sufferings and not just to his death—His sufferings being a response to personal sins, and His death to original sin. “Christ had to satisfy for all sins, not only original but also present ones, and it was for these that he suffered a violent death...”²¹ But the predominant idea of sin was that of personal guilt, in the face of which the idea of satisfaction was born and developed.

But here we must pause for a moment. What! Should man be burdened with the thought that he is guilty before God? Should we think of God as the Being before whom we are first and foremost guilty, and therefore, punishable? What suspicions would such an idea of God be subject to! What resentment would feed and poison faith in such a God! But, the truth is that nothing, not even God, can prevent us from being guilty, having freely done what is evil, what is unacceptable. But before God we are the sinner who is forgiven, the lost sheep who is sought out. Yes, God’s response to sin is forgiveness, a willingness to forgive: a forgiveness that does not minimize or annulling such sin but, rather, abolishes it, giving birth to purity and life in its place. The coming of the Son in sinful flesh is already, in itself, forgiveness and reconciliation, since it implies that God made man takes upon himself all fault and guilt. And it is a forgiveness so total, so superabundant a return of what had been lost and rejected, that it brings with it not only the forgetting of the fault, but its transformation into its opposite.

5. The true concept of satisfaction

Therefore, how can Christ’s suffering cancel out the sin we have committed?

It would be fascinating to here show how the idea of satisfaction was born and developed from that of punishment for sin, of ransom or just price paid, of debt discharged, and how it can itself be perfected, stripped of all legalism, and push beyond the limitations of the notion of satisfaction. Without a doubt, in the human sense of the word, “satisfaction” belongs to the realm of justice. According to Saint Thomas, there is a rigorous correspondence between suffering and sin, both being forms of evil.²² Pain is what is contra voluntatem, what breaks or thwarts our appetite for good or happiness, whereas sin is secundum voluntatem, being the fulfillment of our own will, which takes itself as its rule in order to obtain enjoyment, independence, and domination. We can therefore see a kind of justice within the world of freedom, in this re-ordering of the will by suffering and pain.²³ Exact justice even requires that there be a correspondence between the very nature of the affliction or privation involved in the punishment and the type of enjoyment or contentment that the sinner has given himself through the abuse or de-sregulation of his freedom, by taking himself as his rule and end. This correspondence was very strikingly illustrated b Dante in his Inferno. Unless we entrust ourselves to a kind of natural law of compensation, a kind of kharma, we can only turn to God to judge the fault in its subjective culpability. Let us add that wherever punishment surpasses fault, it is unjust and cries out for order to be restored. But here we see a crucial distinction between pure and simple punishment and satisfying punishment. Suffering and punishment can be imposed on the will, not consented to by it. It is inflicted, if only by the nature of things, as the very consequence and fruit of the fault. At that point, it does not repair the fault, it is not satisfactory, it is punishment, and although such punishment in itself re-establishes the order of the world and of values, it does not re-establish it in the one who has sinned. On the other hand, it can be voluntary, accepted and assumed, through a willingness to disavow, deny, and repair the evil that one has committed. In that case, it is satisfactory. It is the restoration of order in the very person who has violated it. “The stain of sin (i.e. the permanence of sin in the person who committed it, guilt) cannot be removed by man unless his will accepts the order of divine justice, which he does either by spontaneously assuming a punishment in compensation for his past fault, or by patiently bearing the one that God sends him (or allows). At that point, and in either case, the punishment is the reason for satisfaction.”²⁴ Human experience clearly shows that accepted suffering purifies and rehabilitates. The person who accepts it is thereby restored to the state destroyed by his sin. It purifies the will from the sin committed and restores it to its true good. It overcomes the irreversibility of our actions. It clads the person with a new dignity and purity. It restores innocence. And since we are talking about sin in relation to God, the acceptance and offering of suffering involves not only a will for justice, but also more love than would have been necessary to simply live by the rule [of law]. Indeed, it takes more love to overcome oneself than to simply reach one’s fulfillment, to go to God by tearing oneself away, be this only for a time, from what one loves, than to go to God through what one loves.

6. How the Cross of Christ pushes beyond the limitations of the concept of satisfaction

This is where the idea that Christ’s suffering and death could be a satisfaction for sin takes on its full meaning. Because these are voluntary, they exclude any idea of punishment. And this willingness to make satisfaction is a protestation of love for God who has been offended. Let us take care to understand the word “satisfaction” in its strictest sense, “to do enough,” and let us give it all the scope it needs so that it might apply to God. Yes, to do enough in order to compensate, to cancel out the evil that has been committed: that is, to perform an act that gives God the very thing that sin claims to take away from Him, that is the very opposite of sin, namely love, a love that is greater and more perfect than that which was negated through sin. Indeed, in Christ’s passion and death, what pleases God is the charity expressed therein, that charity which we said, with Saint Thomas, was God’s own love communicated to His human heart. For if, in His passion and death, “Christ offered the Father something greater than what would have been necessary to compensate for the offense committed by all of mankind, this was on account of the immense and perfect charity with which He suffered,”²⁵ and what God was able to “accept in Christ’s passion was that He took it on voluntarily, for it came from the most extreme charity.”²⁶ This love is imputed to us by virtue of the same mystical identification that dominates the entire mystery of Redemption. Jesus represents us, and what has been said about merit is likewise true of satisfaction, though with this difference: Jesus first merits for Himself what He merits for His own, whereas He does not in any way have to make satisfaction for Himself. We must therefore understand how it is Jesus makes our sins his own: He does not take on our guilt, no; rather, He bears within Himself the whole of mankind and every man as a sinner, and what results in Him is the will to make reparation for our sin, indeed out of love for God and, if I dare say, not merely to save us and obtain forgiveness, but so that universal evil no longer exists, that it is, as it were, annihilated, absorbed into the good, so that a good that is more beautiful, purer than the offending evil might be offered to God. Therefore, let us represent Christ to ourselves as taking charge of the destiny of the whole of creation, as becoming the alter ego of each and every one of us, carrying in His conscience—as only He can because He is God made man— the passionate sense of what God is in Himself and for man, the sense and horror at what sin is as the “de-divinization” of the world. No, for Him, it is not a question of being punished by God, but of making Himself the soul of the whole of creation, so that it can deny the evil it has—in being born to freedom—opposed to God, and in so doing finally to cleanse itself of it, returning to its original purity, to the purity of that which, having left God’s hands now returns to Him.

Clearly, the fact that this is accomplished by God made man is what gives Christ’s satisfaction its value, its perfection, a value that is wholly disproportioned to what a man who was only a man could have done. But could a man who was only a man have satisfied in strict justice? That is to say, to equalize and therefore compensate, through the perfection of his restorative love, the offense against God that is the totality of the evil committed in the universe? No, it has been answered, because there is something infinite in sin, or—and this is what St. Thomas invokes above all—because of the unlimited universality of sin (it alone could equal human nature in its totality), and above all, I think, because only the Incarnation of God could make the nature assumed by the Word the true “representative” of the human race, and indeed of the whole of creation. But in any case, what Christ has done goes far beyond justice: it is a superabundant satisfaction. It is something much more than satisfaction or reconciliation: it is the establishment of a new relationship between man and God, a kind of glorification of God through man that would not have been the case had man maintained his innocence.

But wait! By demanding prior satisfaction and much more than satisfaction, would God not thereby be putting a condition on His forgiveness? Isn’t this contrary to the whole of the Gospel?—No. All that is required from the sinner is conversion of heart, that is, repentance and repudiation of sin. But this conversion has first been achieved in our name, in the person of Jesus Christ. In this respect, it is a prerequisite. However, far from being the condition of divine forgiveness, it presupposes it and is its effect. What great forgiveness it is for one to take the very fault upon oneself! It is a man, the whole man, who makes reparation in this way. And if no sinner can accept the forgiveness offered without making this gesture of conversion himself, what he appropriates and reproduces is the deed that Christ first did in his name. It is also satisfying, but its satisfactory value is founded entirely on what, in Christ, is much more than satisfaction. But above all, as Saint Thomas tells us in a remarkable text that has received too little attention: this condition for forgiveness, the cross of Jesus, is not so much concerned with the demands of divine justice as it is about the glory of man.²⁷ For God could, of course, forgive without any prior satisfaction, except that which is included in the conversion of hearts. However, if He willed that it should take place and be perfect, this is because it is more glorious for man to restore his nature and destiny through his own acts than to purely and simply receive his salvation—just as it was for his greatness and glory, for his loftiest likeness to God, that man was created while still needing to shape himself and complete himself by earning his ultimate fulfillment in eternal life. This does not diminish the role of God’s grace but, rather, affirms man’s proper role under its dominion, though not without the risk of sin. What a consecration of man’s greatness, this appeal to his free, costly, and generous cooperation, and what a true reconciliation, which on both sides is the work of love! But since man could not, even with God’s grace, truly make satisfaction for sin, God became man, so that he could do so, and even go far beyond mere satisfaction in the perfection of his return to God. It is therefore easy to understand why, far from substituting Himself for man in this victory over sin, Christ associated Himself with him, taking his headship rather than his place—or first taking his place in order to be able to take his headship and enabling those whom He saves and unites to Himself, whom He incorporates into himself, to cooperate in their own salvation as well as that of others.

But if it is through His love that Christ compensates for and cancels out all sin in the world, what is the point of His suffering and even His death? Does not Saint Thomas say that where love is perfect, it annuls pain? Let us not forget that Christ’s crucifixion was not directly willed by God or by Himself. In itself suffering is abhorrent and detested, the effect of evil, and Jesus experiences it as such with the determination to finally abolish it, so that he might obtain what is needed for every tear to be wiped from human eyes. He experiences it in our name, and His prayer in Gethsemane is said in our name as well as His own: “If it is possible, let this chalice pass away...” (Mt. 26:39). However, the chalice could not be removed. It had to be taken in hand and drunk. Therefore, this great evil that it was and that it signified was to give Christ’s redeeming love a perfection and fruitfulness for the salvation of men that He—both He and the Father—did not will to deprive them of. But what does suffering add to love? From the perspective of justice, nothing. It’s easy to show that from this perspective, one drop of Christ’s blood would have been enough to satisfy an infinite number of worlds. And the drop of blood itself is useless, since Christ’s love, expressed in life and joy, is pure and perfect enough to compensate for all the evil in the world. But from the perspective of love, the gift of one’s life, the painful wrenching away of one’s earthly life, is the proof, the very realization by one’s whole being of that total self-gift in which love consists. And this love itself is suffering. As Saint Thomas says, “Christ not only suffered the pain of being snatched from his bodily life, but also the pain of the sins of all others: a pain that exceeded all the pain of all repentance, because of the wisdom and charity from which it proceeded, and because He suffered all sins taken together.”²⁸ If Jesus is truly the one who takes on the sin of the world, sin becomes pain in him, and so he repairs it. His passion and death are inflicted on Him by men, but they become the expression—and indeed the moment par excellence—of sovereign lucidity, of this pain attached to His very being, to His vocation as a man for others.

However, the riches of Christ’s cross are decidedly inexhaustible. Let us remember that Redemption is an act of man, an act to be accomplished by man, that God became man so that man could work out his own salvation by his own actions and not to exempt him from this. He suffered so that man himself might make satisfaction: “man,” that is, all that is human in Jesus, in body and soul. Saint Thomas says that Jesus did not take advantage of the weight that His divinity added to the least of His actions: He suffered what all men have or would have to suffer in order to make satisfaction, purify themselves, and be saved.²⁹ Every man can find in his own suffering a model for his own, even up to that of divine dereliction. In all the physical, moral, and spiritual sufferings that the Passion narratives make known or foretell to us, there is a kind of exemplary realization of our own sufferings. For Christ left them to us, though he transformed their meaning. The full and perfect satisfaction Christ offered to the Father does not cancel out the satisfaction we ourselves will have to offer but, rather, grounds it and bestows upon it its full value. It would not be enough for us to be mystically in Him as He suffers and dies in an infinite act of love, if we did not share in His suffering and death through our own real and personal suffering and death. Moreover suffering, supported by Christ’s own suffering, not only purifies us from sin committed by ourselves or by others, bringing about the renewal of our whole being that sinners need so as to feel that he is reborn; it also purifies us from that which is not yet sin, but the effect and source of sin, the wounds of sin. Suffering is a harsh discipline that lifts the person who submits to it with strength and greatness of soul. Through suffering, we give birth to a higher life. It is not a question of satisfaction, but of purification, renunciation, and effort: what Christ Himself compared to taking up the cross and following after Him. However, we would not need to suffer in order to reach the summit of ourselves, going all the way to God, if it weren’t for sin, both personal and original. Speaking of these sufferings which are for a higher good, Saint Thomas says: “Such ‘detrimenta’ are not ‘simpliciter’ but ‘secundum quid’ only an evil for man. Thus, they are not so much punishments as remedies. And yet, in a way, they are punishments. The very fact that remedies are needed for human nature comes from the corruption of human nature, which in turn comes from original sin. In the state of innocence, it would not have been necessary to lead someone to the perfection of virtue by means of painful exercises.”³⁰ Jesus certainly did not need asceticism or dark nights to experience in His human soul the unheard-of fullness of His union with the deity. But He endures the equivalent in order to be its exemplar, and thus its aid, so that His acceptance of the evils and difficulties of a sinful nature, by enabling us to participate in His resurrection through communion in His sufferings, saves us only by means of a greater union with Him and, consequently, by means of a greater love between man and God. This is the last word of the mystery of Redemption.

After all that, it has to be said that human suffering is something quite different from satisfaction—how many innocent people suffer!—purification, and spiritual ascent—how often does suffering more so crush than purify and uplift. Indeed, it is often the work of men, and therefore of evil, or of unchecked nature, left to its own devices. And it is disproportionate. Jesus took it on as such, no doubt in order to enable it to cry out to God and finally obtain justice and not only forgiveness, in order to give it, even without the conscious participation of those who suffer it, a redeeming value for the world. Who will speak of the presence of the risen Jesus—who first, however, passed through the cross and death—alongside every human suffering, He who endured “the same torments”? And how great and conscious the revolt would have to be for Jesus’ promise to the crucified thief at his side not to be whispered, if not always explicitly heard, and above all fulfilled: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43)!

In the name of this exemplary value of Christ’s passion, we do not need to see in each of His sufferings the very height of what man can suffer. Even when St. Thomas says that Christ suffered all human suffering, Thomas wisely specifies that this means all kinds of human suffering.³¹ And it is true that there were and are worse and lengthier tortures, and that, as Thomas himself taught, “to suffer with love is already to suffer less.” It suffices that Jesus endured a terrible passion, one of those passions that absorb the whole of one’s being, and that neither the presence of the deity within Him, nor the light of His soul, nor the mastery of His will sheltered Him from pain. What is “lacking in Christ’s passion” (Col. 1:24) are the sufferings that He did not suffer and that He suffers in His members. Yet what is lacking is infinitely compensated for by the compassion of Him who is a man for others, and by that searing vision of evil in its totality and of what evil is for God when God becomes incarnate—and perhaps, and without doubt, by that communion by which he joined man, all men, in the perception of the absence of God, of abandonment by God, the perception of that very thing which is the evil of sin, its essential evil, contained and diluted in all the others, but in a pure state in Him. But of course, this remains utterly hidden from those who hold that Jesus is only as a man, not God made man.

Here, our meditation takes us to the very depths of the mystery of evil. And how can we understand redemption if not as victory over evil? Not just the liberation and restoration of man, but the liberation and salvation of the whole of creation, “which awaits in the pain of childbirth the revelation of the children of God” (Rom. 8:19). Evil, the ransom of the creature’s necessary limitation, the ransom of his very greatness (to be like God), the ransom of his freedom, the ransom of his creaturely reality and truth. There is a literary trope that says that God created His rival by creating man. But the theology of angelic sin, of sin prior to all human history, goes much further than this literature. It is true that evil was born of the creature, making it evil, even though it was good and splendid. Because we do not have an immediate enough sense of God, we are not touched by this attack on the sacred, on the absolute, on the sovereign divine goodness. Let us at least be sensitive to the attack on His work, to the great cry that issues forth from all sides, to what is translated into the pain, scandal, death, suffering that is often undeserved by those who suffer it, for the world is a whole, a de-regulated whole, and the blind logic of its laws, having gone mad and its vices multiplied, comes to crush individuals. One man had in his human conscience the perception of evil and of its profound essence, which is to be like the inversion of the divine, of the divine which alone makes the goodness and beauty of the world; and one man repaired it by the very perfection of love, whose essence is to be the expression of the divine—one man in whom all creation was, as it were, present and active. But that God himself should be this man, it seems to me, is not solely because any other man would be inadequate to the task of cleansing the whole universe of the evil that inhabits it. It seems to me that this is in order to respond to the scandal of unpunished sin and unjust suffering, to the cry of the humiliated, the offended, and even the punished. In response to Job, God imposed silence, proclaiming His incomprehensible transcendence. But to us, from now on, He responds only by Himself coming to carry the human cross and make it the path to salvation. He came “not to explain, but to fill,” as Claudel superbly put it.³² In response to the accusations of injustice and cruelty hurled at him by men, to the denial of His existence that pays homage to the idea one has fashioned concerning God, He silently responds by taking upon himself the totality of evil. He Himself becomes Job. It is normal for one to speak of God’s “powerlessness” in the face of evil, of His “weakness”: not of God, no, for in Him it is nothing other than power overcome by respect for the freedom of His creature and infinite patience with him; but, as regards this humanity, in which He is incarnate, yes. One also speaks of the suffering and compassion of God: not of God Himself, no, except in the transcendent form of hatred for evil, both in its form as pain and as sin; but of the humanity of Jesus, yes, in which His infinite compassion for the world is incarnated and takes human form. In Jesus, it is not merely man who makes satisfaction to God by repairing what he has destroyed: it is God who satisfies man’s request, his complaint, by taking his place along those who suffer, in order to rise again with all those whom He came to seek.

3. Complementarity of the two paths

Although the first type of explanation of the Redemption predominated during the era of high patristic Christology, while the second developed during the era of medieval and, then, scholastic theology, they have never been mutually exclusive. Nor can they be. The “physical” theory is better at explaining redemption from death and misfortune than from sin and guilt. And it is always accompanied by the idea that the Word could not have repaired and divinized the human He made His own, without the human himself, in His person, having paid his debt. However rudimentary the process of acquittal that was imagined during this period might have been for a long time, it was always a legal or moral process, which was gradually perfected so as to lead to the so-called system of vicarious satisfaction, which itself, as we have already said, needs to be pushed beyond its own limitations. But this progress, this greater demand for explanation, leaves room, indeed necessary room, for what we have called the first way. What does Christ achieve by reconciling man with God, if not the fact that the power of divinization contained in Him through His Incarnation and His human life at last accomplishes its work and takes hold of the world? The first system manifests more clearly than the second the inseparability of death and resurrection in man’s salvation. If it is through death that Christ destroys sin and death, it is through resurrection that He gives new life. “Dead for our sins, risen for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). But the second way leads us to the same truth. Christ formally saved us by his death only because, by reconciling us to God, it earned him His own resurrection and ours. And it is by entering the Holy of Holies (cf. Heb. 9:12), the bosom of God, risen and alive, that He actually conquers our salvation. What did Jesus do by the human act³³ that was His redemptive act, if not to become the “cause of eternal salvation” (Heb. 5:9), in order to accomplish the divinization of redeemed men?

III. Sacrifice and Redemption

Now, up to this point, we have hardly mentioned the word sacrifice, which, along with redemption, is the most commonly used to define the meaning of Jesus’ cross. It is also the most biblical, connecting the New Testament to the Old, the new economy to all that preceded it, religion in spirit and truth to man’s natural religions. But how ambiguous is the word “sacrifice,” and what a transformation in meaning it must undergo before it can be applied to Christ’s saving work! Nothing in what happened on the cross resembles a ritual sacrifice. Those who crucified Christ did not, strictly speaking, immolate Him, for they did not in any way offer Him to God. It is the victim Himself who offers Himself, and it is in this sense that Christ is said to be both priest and victim. But He does not immolate Himself, and the word “victim” is contradicted by the resurrection of Him who has only passed through death. The covenant between man and God, through the shedding of blood as a symbol of the gift of life, is what the sacrifices of the Old Law had in common, even though they were already so purified. And however impotent these may appear in the light of the Cross, they were an effort to conciliate God, to reconcile with Him, to please Him. However, as the prophets had said, what truly pleases God is man’s heart when it is contrite and humble, and his actions when they are just and merciful. What do goats and bulls matter to the true God? We can only think of it as an external rite, a symbol, intended not to replace the offering that man must make of himself to God, but to express its intention, to make it manifest, to give it substance. As Saint Augustine so profoundly put it: “The external sacrifice is the sacrament, i.e. the sacred sign, of the internal sacrifice,”³⁴ the only reality capable of pleasing God. The externalization of sacrifice is not just the “rite” but, rather, “every act by which man draws closer to God.” In fact, every act of human life can be consecrated to God and become a sacrifice (cf. Rom. 12:1–2). And for the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, it was “upon entering the world,” that is, from the start of His existence as a man, that Christ professed that the meaning of His life was to be offered to God: this will be consummated by the supreme offering of His body, but it began with His very first human acts, in the fulfillment of the Father’s will (cf. Heb. 10:4–10). What the psalm quoted by Hebrews (Ps. 11:7–9) asked of every good Israelite is here applied to Christ in a quite unique way, as is also unique among all the “sacrifices” of righteous men that universal value of purification and sanctification which ritual sacrifices represented, without realizing them.

How can we impute to Christian theology, or even to the Letter to the Hebrews, an idea of sacrifice extracted from the history of religions and even from the human unconscious, when, on the contrary, it is most explicitly rejected? Theologians of yore were ignorant of the history of religions and the human sciences, but they nevertheless understood perfectly well that this was something natural to man. They spoke of it as an act par excellence of the natural virtue of religion, of the worship due to God. To God! Everything changes with man’s idea of God: in this case, it is God as revealed by Jesus Christ. And by taking on the act of religion like everything else human, Christ has brought it to perfection, pushed beyond its limitations, and entirely renewed it. In sacrifice, our theologians have seen above all an effort to express to God the religious worship that could be pleasing to Him. “Sacrifice,” therefore, means man professing the fact that He totally belongs to God, to a God who loves him and gives Himself (and not only His benefits) to the extent of his openness and self-offering. It befits human nature that this expression be visible and social, but it is first and foremost an interior one. And if, like everything else human, the inner is only real when it is externalized, then it must be externalized in the acts of life before it is externalized in ritual. That it must be bloody, i.e. painful, even to the point of death, whether in the symbol of a rite or in reality, is accidental to the idea of sacrifice; it pertains to the state of sin that separates man from God and which must be annulled, compensated for, and overcome in order to achieve union.

This is how St. Thomas understands Christ’s passion and death to have been a sacrifice: “Sacrifice is properly that which is performed according to what is owed to God and in order to please Him. Indeed, as Saint Augustine says, ‘a true sacrifice is any work accomplished with the aim of uniting us to God in a holy society, in relation to that infinite Good which alone can make us blessed.’ Christ offered Himself for us in His passion. And the very fact that He suffered His passion voluntarily was supremely approved by God insofar as it came forth from the greatest love.”³⁵ To which he adds: “From the perspective of those who crucified Christ, His passion was a crime; but from the perspective of the charity of Him who suffered, it was a sacrifice.”³⁶ To say that the supreme sacrifice is to lay down one’s life for what one considers to be more than oneself, is not just something expressed by particularly spiritualizing and already-reinterpreting theologians. We can say that since Christianity, this has passed into common parlance, and that to make a sacrifice, to sacrifice one’s life, is to renounce oneself, one’s interests, one’s life, out of generosity, out of love for something greater and more important, something more loved than oneself. There is nothing similar in the common usage of the corresponding words in ancient Greek and Latin. As is clear, the idea of sacrifice includes those of merit and satisfaction. First of all, it completes them: it is to God that merit and satisfaction are offered, and it is by offering Himself in the supreme and decisive act of love that Jesus merits and satisfies. However by encompassing them, by completing them, it gives them a greater scope: the glory to be perfectly rendered to God. Beyond all the good obtained by the creature’s sacrifice, which is in fact God Himself (God gives Himself to His creature, who gives himself to Him),³⁷ there is the good of God, which the creature realizes as much as He is therein. Thus, the image of Jesus, summing up all creation in Himself and, in its name but also as its head, responding to the Father by the supreme act of self-gift, is truly that of the triumph of man in the triumph of God. “Father, glorify your Son so that your Son may glorify you” (Jn. 27:1). This concept of a man-for-others, which we have already drawn forth from that of His death-for-us, finds new strength and intelligibility in that of the Universal Priest—indeed, all the more so since He appears not only as the one who obtains everything for all but as the one who Himself gives what He obtains, doing so from that which He already has in fullness. Finally, in the concept of sacrifice, the inseparability of Christ’s death and resurrection in the accomplishment of our salvation is evident. Christ’s sacrifice—and from now on this will be true of every sacrifice—is a passage through suffering and death. Not that there would be some other act of offering in heaven that would be other than that of earthly life, of the cross, of death itself, for it is the same act continued. Nor does He offer anything other than Himself. But He offers Himself as risen, as the one who merited all things by passing through death and merited all things by rising again: merited all and able to give all from His fullness, not only to earthly men but to the blessed. “Being fully purified, they will be fully consummated by the same Christ upon whom their glory will depend.”³⁸ For it is in the light of Christ that the blessed see God, and from the fullness of His glory that they receive theirs. And if every sacrifice is consummated and completed in a communion, it is in the eternal communion of the blessed with the deity that the eternal sacrifice will be consummated. Christ will be the mediator of both communion and sacrifice.

To better characterize the nature of Christ’s Passover sacrifice, we add the adjective “redemptive” to the word sacrifice. And it is indeed the word “redemption” which, par excellence, designates the dogma of salvation through Christ’s cross. This is because it perfectly and comprehensively embraces all the aspects of the mystery, while at the same time bringing its own harmonics to it, which we must now highlight.

This is an important and even central word in the Old Testament to designate Yahweh’s saving intervention. Essentially, it means liberation, the liberation of a captive people, indeed by the very one to whom this people belongs. The concept is extremely closely linked to the religion of Israel, to its awareness of being a unique and privileged people, to its history, but also to its mysterious hope: hope in a kingdom where God alone would reign. This is the concept that has been completely reinterpreted by Christianity in the light of the cross and the resurrection. Jesus, the Messiah, brings redemption to all who believe in Him. Redemption, therefore, is a salvation that is first and foremost a liberation: from all the evils that weigh upon humanity, including pain, injustice, and servitude—but first and foremost, from darkness and sin, which affect man’s freedom at its very source (cf. Col. 1:13–14). The redeemed man certainly belongs to God, and the word indicates this strongly, but he belongs to a God who, by the power of His grace, leaves him—or rather makes him—free from any law that is not that of love, a God who draws him out of the tyranny of the flesh and sin. Christ frees man from the feeling of guilt, not only by announcing it, by teaching it, by giving him the feeling of being absolutely forgiven and purified of all that, in him, could be reproached, but also by sweeping away every other judgment than His own, all human condemnation, whether ideological or social, by replacing the law with grace, and all forms of “superego” with liberation and the full and free realization of the true “self,” the one that comes from God, is loved by God, goes to God. What is more, He does not impose his salvation on him, but calls him to it. He does not save him without first saving his freedom, that is, himself. He leaves it intact, at the risk of the refusal to which He exposed Himself in the days of His earthly humanity. In Jesus, God made man, human freedom reaches its peak in the most total, perfect, and personal act of love. And the grace that comes from Him, however free and powerful it may be, will never stand in the way of this freedom, which on the contrary it arouses and associates with it. The very idea of resurrection is intelligible to us only as a perfect liberation of the life of the spirit from matter: not in the Platonic way, which in order to liberate the spirit separates it and enables it to escape from matter, but rather, in the properly Christian way, that of the Incarnation, which hopes for a matter entirely at the service of the spirit. And even before being freed from death for life, man is freed from the fear of death, from that being-toward-death which is his natural dread, and is transformed in Christ into being-toward-life.

But is redemption an act of God or an act of man? In the Old Testament, redemption was never seen as anything other than God’s own act. And the Messiah Himself could only be envisaged as the intermediary, the instrument of divine intervention. Is the same true of this Messiah, Jesus? The redemption He brings about is first and foremost an act of God, since it begins with the Incarnation, since it is the Son’s gift to the world, since it is the deity that communicates to all the human acts of the Incarnate Word their divinizing power and their infinite moral worth, since, in the end, it is the deity that destroys death through the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus. And yet, it is an act of man, a human act, since it is through His human acts that Christ obtains the communication of his to us, since it is as man in the strongest, most unheard-of, most universal sense of the word that He acts, lives and dies: yes, a human act, since in Jesus it is man who dialogues with the Father and who, as head of the whole of creation, returns to Him. And in this twofold aspect of the indivisible redemptive act, we find the two paths that Christian thought has followed in order to understand the mystery of the Redemption. In one, the starting point was God’s act of taking on human nature and transforming it, first in Christ and then in all of us; in the other, consideration focuses on human acts and their redemptive value, which is their moral and religious value. But the word “redemption” also means the payment of a ransom, the act by which Christ redeems us. This ransom is the blood shed (cf. 1 Cor. 6:20), the life given (cf. Mk. 10:45). However, we must leave behind this suggestive image if we are to understand to whom this blood and this life have been offered: to the very One who frees us, to God. As we have seen, this has been developed in the idea of satisfaction, though without emphasizing what remains so strongly expressed in the idea of redemption, namely belonging to the one who redeemed us: “You were put to death with regard to the Law by the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who rose from the dead” (Rom. 7:4). By belonging to Him who has redeemed us from the slavery of the flesh, of sin and of the world, we are indeed made, according to St. Paul’s powerful image, “His members,” not just members of a community having Him as its head—in the strongest sense that we might give to that term—but His members, that is, the complement of His humanity, living by His own life and impulses, “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23).

But the concept of redemption extends beyond human beings. It is universal in scope. Already the mysterious text of Rom. 8:19–22 tells us that the whole of creation is impatiently awaiting “the revelation of the children of God, groaning (as though) in the pains of childbirth.” Thus, it too needs to be redeemed. And this perspective is broadened still further in the letters from Paul’s imprisonment. Here it is a question of “bringing the times to their fulfillment, of uniting the whole universe under one head, Christ, what is in heaven and what is on earth” (Eph. 1:10).

This great and immense vision of the recapitulation of all that exists in Jesus Christ is mysteriously connected to the cross in the Letter to the Colossians: “God was pleased to make all fullness dwell in Him, and to reconcile all things through Him and for Him, on earth and in heaven, having established peace through the blood of His cross” (Col. 1:19-20). What is this fullness, this pleroma? “The fullness of the divinity that dwells in Him bodily” (Col. 2:9)? Or the fullness of “grace,” of created participation in the deity, in which every spiritual creature is called to participate? Or the totality of all that exists, over which His sway is absolute and which He carries in His mind, in His heart, which He represents and personifies? All these meanings, all of which are exegetically possible, theologically immense and great, are in fact connected to each other. The fullness of deity brings with it the fullness of grace, which brings with it the fullness of Christ’s sway over all that exists. And the word “reconciliation” makes us think of the reunion, in Christ, of what was separated, as Eph. 2:16 says for Gentiles and Jews only, whereas in our text reconciliation concerns all that is in any way separated “in heaven and on earth.” But what then is meant by “the blood of His cross”? Does the redemptive sacrifice have an effect on the whole of creation? Was sin, or to put it better, evil, to be found in the whole of God's work, and does salvation make it whole and entire again? However, let us be careful here. When Saint Paul speaks of the heavens and the earth, it is not so much the material cosmos that interests him as everything that inhabits it: “all Authority, Power, Might, Sovereignty and every other name that can be named, not only in this world, but also in the world to come” (Eph. 1:21), to whom the apostles of Jesus Christ make known the Mystery “kept hidden from all time in God, the Creator of the universe,” which is the mystery of the Church (ibid., 3:9–10). For St. Paul, the “Powers” that rule the universe are not necessarily beneficial, and even if they are beneficial, Christ is their head (cf. Col. 2:10). However, he is indeed speaking of the evil and enemy powers when he says that, once the “bond” that accused mankind had been “nailed to the cross, He stripped these Authorities and Powers, made a public spectacle of them, and dragged them along in the triumphal procession of the cross” (Col. 2:14 f.). And indeed, behold, behind the sins of men, behind the force of sin that dwells in them, and perhaps behind the death that reigns over them, there appears the “god of this world, the prince who reigns between heaven and earth, the spirit who now acts among the rebels you followed when you were dead because of your faults and the sins in which you were once engaged” (Eph. 2, 1-2). We here recognize the “Prince of Darkness,” St. John’s “Prince of this world.” And then, in the drama of the Redemption, the struggle between Christ and the enemy of man appears in all its force, causing Jesus to say in the 4^th Gospel, as He is about to enter His passion: “The prince of this world is coming” (Jn. 14:30). Of course, this kind of language is not confined to Christianity. Is this a reason to hold that it is nothing more than a personification of the power of evil? Should we hold that this idea of an evil power under whose power man and the universe have been left is outdated and purely mythological? I am not asking about the existence of angels, good or evil, but about their role in our world, in the human world, in the drama of Redemption. The Church Fathers, and with them the ancient baptismal liturgy, took Saint Paul and Saint John very seriously. “We are not contending against men, but the Authorities, the Powers, the Rulers of this world of darkness, the evil spirits in the heavens” (Eph. 6:12). In a very elaborate angelology, pure of all gnostic elements if not of all use of Aristotle, St. Thomas attributes to angels an active role as second causes in the natural functioning of the world, a role that their fall, leaving their powerful and superb nature intact, could not have taken away from them. He would thus have been able to given meaning to the idea of the action of evil spirits on the universe itself and on the forces that lead to death: does not the Letter to the Hebrews say that Christ by His death “reduced to powerlessness the one who held the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14)? He did not, as far as I know, and what he calls the power of the devil, from which Christ has delivered us, is the power he has through our sin to tempt us with a very spiritual action performed by a purely spiritual spirit.³⁹ And when he asks whether the devil is the chief of sinners, he answers that the first sin, that of the devil who “sinned from the beginning” (1 Jn. 3:8), proposes itself to all as one to be imitated, and some imitate him at his suggestion, others of their own accord and without any suggestion from outside of themselves (sponte propria et absque ulla suggestione).⁴⁰ It is in this sense that “whoever commits sin is of the devil (ibid.). And if “the whole world is under the sway of the Evil One” (ibid., 5:19), this is because the three concupiscences triumph in its structures and mentality (cf. ibid., 2:16), so that it is “the works of the devil” that Christ has come to “destroy” in the world (ibid., 3:8). This is a perfect and rigorous demythologization of a fully accepted fact, which leaves intact the dramatic reality of the Redemption as the struggle by God made man against the Prince of Darkness, to wrest from him his disciples and followers who are sinners.⁴¹

Thus, redemption appears to us, in all its force, as a victory: victory over evil and misfortune; victory over all the forces that make for evil and misfortune. But, this victory is still in a sense not complete, for the Redemption is not yet complete and the act of redemption is still at work. Certainly, by His cross and resurrection, Christ was constituted as the “cause of eternal salvation” (Heb. 5:9), and it is as having been crucified for us that, in His state of glorious resurrection and power, He communicates to us, through faith and the sacraments, the remission of sins and divine life. However, the story of this action by the Risen Christ in time is a long and dramatic one, and it is, as it were, a permanent re-actualization—in all the places and moments of human existence—of this sacrifice accomplished on the cross and consummated in the resurrection. Long is this history and long the struggle, a long continuation of Christ’s earthly struggle, through the same word, proclaimed by His ministers, facing the same darkness, the same refusal, the same enemy, and the same hesitant or ardent welcoming of this word. “If the world hates you, know that it hated me first... if they persecuted me, they will persecute you too; if they kept my word, they will keep yours as well” (Jn. 15: 18, 20). It is the same word, but also the same “sacrifice”: What is “lacking in Christ’s afflictions, I complete in my flesh for the sake of His body, the Church” (Col. 1:24). This is a surprising statement, but one that we now understand, for we know that Christ’s redemptive work is a human work in which every human being must partake, not so as to add to what Christ has done but, rather, to reproduce and continue it in us. But, this history is heading toward its fulfillment. “Then comes the end, when He hands over the kingship to God the Father, after destroying all domination, all authority, all power. For He must reign, until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” What a powerful personification of death! It is the last enemy to be vanquished. And then comes that mysterious finale, so great in magnitude that we would not want to narrow its scope through our own explanations: “But when He says: ‘All things are subject to him,’ this is obviously excluding the one who subjected all things to Him. And when all things have been made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will make Himself subject to Him who made all things subject to Him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:24–28).

We know, of course, that the Son as man—and therefore as Redeemer and Savior of mankind—is subject to the Father. He does not wait for “the end” to live out this submission in all His being and activity as Redeemer of the world. But, when that last day shall come, the time of struggle and conquest will cease, and, with everything submitted to Him, He will be able to “hand over the Kingdom” to the Father, so that, taking possession of the world reclaimed by Jesus, the deity may take possession of all things, penetrate and vivify them, and “be all in all,” first in Christ’s own humanity and, through it, in every redeemed creature. Jesus will no longer need to lead anyone anywhere, for all will be at the end, in Him, and He in the Father. Then the Redemption will be complete. “It will be the end,” that is, that toward which all things tend.

* * *

I believe in Him “who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). This is the substance of our faith in Redemption. And it is also the last word in theological reflection. Whether we are speaking about the power of the Incarnation to make Christ the bearer of all humanity, whether we are speaking about merit and what pain and death add to that merit, whether we are speaking about sacrifice and the absolute victory over evil and misfortune that was the Cross of Jesus—what is at work, what acts and triumphs, is love alone. Certainly, in this economy of God’s salvation of mankind, there is a fulfillment of justice. But this is, in reality, a superabundance of love, since the only just and perfect response to what is, above all, an attack upon love, is the greatest love, since there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for those one loves, and finally, since He who does this is God Himself become man. And this is undoubtedly the final word of the Cross, the way in which it saves us absolutely: it is the revelation of God as Love. Revelation would not be enough to save if the same act that reveals were not at the same time the one that gives the grace to understand and respond. For if God reveals Himself to us as Love, this is because our only salvation lies in imitating that love. Indeed, a love that is, like Jesus’, inseparably for God and for man, for all men.

Yes, that’s it: the demands of love alone explain the Redemption and how it came about. Love is certainly mercy, pity, generosity and self-giving, and all these aspects of love appear in the Cross. But love is also—and last but also above all—the will to union, without which it would not be love but, rather, only goodness and benevolence. This will to union, which brought about the Incarnation, pushes to its very end in the act of redemption. By suffering and dying for me, by taking on my sinful humanity in order to “clothe” me with His risen self, Christ creates a bond between Himself and me that His divinity alone could not have created, nor even the Incarnation alone—above all if the mystery of Redemption is not just that of Jesus dying and rising for us, but of man himself reliving that death and resurrection in order to have full communion with his God.

fr. Marie-Joseph Nicolas, O. P.

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1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (ed. Brunschvicg), no. 593.↩︎

2. ST III, q. 50, a. 2, ad 1: “Such abandonment is not to be referred to the dissolution of the personal union, but rather to the fact that God the Father exposed him to suffering. Hence, to abandon in this context means nothing other than not protecting him from His persecutors.”↩︎

3. SCG 4.55, Sciendum est etiam: “... licet voluntas Dei non sit ad mortem hominum..., est tamen ad virtutem par quam homo mortem fortiter sustinet et ex caritate periculis mortis se objicit. Et sic voluntas Dei fuit de morte Christi, inquantum Christus eam ex caritate suscepit et fortiter sustinuit.”↩︎

4. In III Sent, d. 16, q. 1, a. 2 (ed. Moos, p. 513, n° 25) : “... quia mors inest Christo ratione humanae naturae, ideo sicut simpliciter concedimus quod Christus mortuus est, ita similiter concedere possumus simpliciter quod necessitatem moriendi habuit, non solum ex causa finali, sed etiam necessitatem absolutam ut moreretur, etiam si non occideretur...”↩︎

5. See St. Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione, bk. 2, ch. 29, no. 48 (PL 44, col. 180): “However, because in Him there was the likeness of sinful flesh, He willed to pass through the various changes taking place throughout the course of life, beginning with infancy itself, so that would seem that even by growing old, His flesh could have come to death had He not been slain while still young.”↩︎

6. ST II-II, q. 171, a. 6, ad 1: “The certainty of divine foreknowledge does not exclude the contingency of individual future events, because it is concerned with them insofar as they are present and already determined to one outcome. Therefore, even prophecy, which is an imprint or sign of divine foreknowledge, does not exclude the contingency of future events by its unchangeable truth.”↩︎

7. ST III, q. 48, a. 2, ad 1: “Caput et membra sunt quasi una persona mystica.”↩︎

8. Ibid., a. 1: “Et ideo opera Christi hoc modo se habent tam ad se quam ad sua membra, sicut se habent opera alterius hominis in gratia constituti ad ipsum.”↩︎

9. Ibid., a. 6, ad 3: “Passio Christi, secundum quod comparatur ad divinitatem ejus, agit per modum efficientiae ; inquantum vero comparatur ad voluntatem animae Christi, agit per modum meriti ; secundum vero quod consideratur in ipsa carne Christi, agit per modum satisfactionis…”↩︎

10. See the first antiphon of Lauds on Holy Saturday: “Ero mors tua, o mors; morsus tuus ero, inferne.” Cf. Hos. 13:14 (Vulg.).↩︎

11. In a remarkable text in the Compendium theologiae, c. 227 (ed. Léon. 42, p. 178, 24-28), Saint Thomas condenses this entire doctrine, distinguishing it with admirable lucidity from that of satisfaction (the second way): “He also willed to die so that not only would His death be a remedy of satisfaction for us, but also a sacrament of salvation, that, in likeness to His death, we might die to carnal life and be transferred to spiritual life.”↩︎

12. ST III, q. 48, a. 6: “Since the humanity of Christ is an instrument of the divinity, consequently all of Christ’s actions and sufferings act instrumentally by the power of divinity for human salvation. And, in this way, Christ’s Passion causes human salvation by way of efficient causality.”↩︎

13. ST III, q. 56, a. 1, ad 3: “… just as the other things Christ did or suffered in His humanity are salvific for us by the power of His divinity, so too Christ’s Resurrection is the efficient cause of our resurrection by the divine power, which properly is the power that gives life to the dead. Indeed, this divine power reaches all places and times in its presence. And such virtual contact suffices for the nature of this efficient causality.”↩︎

14. ibid., q. 47, a. 5: “God the Father delivered Christ to His Passion… insofar as He inspired in Him the will to suffer for us, by infusing charity into Him.”↩︎

15. ibid, ad 2: “Christ, as God, delivered Himself to death by the same will and action by which the Father thus delivered Him. However, insofar as He was man, He delivered Himself by a will inspired by the Father. Thus, there is no contradiction involved in the fact that the Father delivered Christ and He delivered Himself.”↩︎

16. Trans. note: Or more diffusely throughout the Triduum in the Byzantine rites.↩︎

17. Ibid., q. 48, a. 1: “Christo data est gratia non solum sicut singulari personae, sed inquantum est caput Ecclesiae, ut scilicet ab ipso redundaret ad membra. Et ideo opera Christi hoc modo se habent tam ad se quam ad sua membra sicut se habent opera alterius hominis in gratia constituti ad ipsum. Manifestum est autem quod quicumque in gratia constitutus propter justitiam patitur, ex hoc ipso meretur sibi salutem secundum illud Mat. 5, 10 : Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter justitiam. Unde Christus non solum per suam passionem sibi, sed etiam omnibus suis membris meruit salutem.”↩︎

18. Ibid., a. 2, ad 1: “Caput et membra sunt quasi una persona mystica. Et ideo satisfactio Christi ad omnes fideles pertinet sicut ad sua membra : inquantum etiam duo homines sunt unum in caritate, unus pro alio satisfacere potest...”↩︎

19. Trans. note: Somewhat like the contemporary language of structures of sin, though this phrase tends very often toward the impersonal inculpability critiqued by Fr. Nicolas.↩︎

20. Cf. 3a, q. 1, a. 4: “It is certain that Christ came into this world not only to take away the sin that was transmitted originally to [Adam’s] posterity, but also to take away all sins that were subsequently added thereto… Now, the greater the weight of the sin, the more principally did Christ come to remove it. And something is said to be greater in two ways. In one way, it is intensively greater, as more intense whiteness is said to be greater, and in this way, actual sin is greater than original sin because it contains more of the character of voluntariness… In another way, something is said to be greater extensively, as when there is more whiteness on a larger surface. And in this way, original sin, by which all of mankind is infected, is greater than any actual sin, which is proper to an individual person.”↩︎

21. In III Sent., d. 20, a. 4, quaest. 2, ad 1 (ed. Moos, p. 624, no. 76) : “Christus pro omnibus peccatis quantum ad sufficientiam debuit satisfacere, non solum pro originali, sed etiam pro actuali, pro quo infligitur violenta mors.”↩︎

22. See ST I-II, q. 87, a. 1.↩︎

23. See Ibid: “From natural things, it derives to human affairs that whatever rises up against something else it suffers harm from it… Hence, in men we find a natural inclination leading each person to repress whoever rises up against him. Now, it is clear that whatever is contained under a certain order is in some way unified in relation to the principle of that order. Thus, whatever rises up against an order is subdued by that order or the principle of that order. And since sin is a disordered act, it is clear that whoever sins acts against a certain order. Therefore, it follows that he is repressed [through punishment] by that order...”↩︎

24. ST I-II, q. 87, a. 6: “Macula peccati ab homine tolli non potest, nisi voluntas hominis ordinem divinae justitiae acceptet, ut scilicet vel ipse poenam sibi spontaneus assumat in recompensationem culpae praeteritae, vel etiam a Deo illatam patienter sustineat; utroque enim modo poena rationem satisfactionis habet.”↩︎

25. ST III, q. 48, a. 2: “Ille proprie satisfacit pro offensa qui exhibet offenso id quod aeque vel magis diligit quam oderit offensam. Christus autem, ex caritate et patientia patiendo, majus aliquid Deo exhibuit quam exigeret recompensatio totius offensae humani generis. Primo quidem, propter magnitudinem caritatis ex qua patiebatur... “↩︎

26. Ibid., a. 3: “Christus autem seipsum obtulit in passione pro nobis : et hoc ipsum opus quod voluntarie passionem sustinuit, fuit Deo maxime acceptum, utpote ex caritate proveniens.”↩︎

27. In III Sent., d. 20, a. 1, q^1a 2 (ed. Moos, p. 614, no. 23) : “It was also fitting that human nature should be restored through satisfaction… on the part of man, who is more perfectly reintegrated by making satisfaction. Indeed, had full satisfaction not been made, there would not be as much glory after sin as there was in the state of innocence. For it is more glorious that a person fully cleanse the sin committed by making satisfaction than were this sin forgiven without satisfaction being made. Just as it is also more glorious for a man to have eternal life as a result of merits than to attain it without merits, for what one merits, in a certain way, belongs to oneself, insofar as one merits it. Similarly, satisfaction makes the person making satisfaction, in a certain way, the cause of their own purification.”↩︎

28. ST III, q. 46, a. 6, ad 4: “Christus non solum doluit pro amissione vitae corporalis propriae, sed etiam pro peccatis omnium aliorum. Qui dolor in Christo excessit omnem dolorem cujuslibet contriti. Tum quia ex majori sapientia et caritate processit, ex quibus dolor contritionis augetur. Tum etiam quia pro omnium peccatis simul doluit, secundum illud Is. 53, 4: Vere dolores nostros ipse tulit.”↩︎

29. Cf. ibid. ad 6: “Christ willed to free mankind from sins not by power alone, but also through justice. Therefore, He not only considered how much power His suffering would have due to the divinity united with it, but also how much His suffering, according to human nature, would suffice for such great satisfaction.”↩︎

30. In IV Sent. d. 46, q. 1, a. 2, quaest. 3 : “Pati detrimentum in spiritualibus bonis semper malum est, sed pati detrimentum in bonis temporalibus quandoque quidem est bonum, quandoque vero malum. [...] Et quia poena a nocendo dicitur, ideo detrimentum in spiritualibus bonis semper poena est ; sed detrimentum in temporalibus bonis quandoque quidem non est poena, sed medicina proficiens ad salutem, sicut amaritudo potionis non est poena, sed medela corporalis sanitatis. Sed tamen, quia natura nostra talis est ut ad perfectionem spiritualis boni per temporalium detrimenta oporteat pervenire, ex culpa peccati venit quo tota natura vitiata est ; nec tali medicina opus erit, quando vulnus peccati perfecte erit curatum, cum homo ad ultimum finem spiritualis perfectionis perveniet.”↩︎

31. Cf. ST III, q. 46, a. 5 (“Whether Christ endured all sufferings”).↩︎

32. Paul Claudel, Le Chemin de la Croix, Deuxième station (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,1957), 470:

    Behold, O sinner, and see what your sin brought to pass:

    No more crime without a God above it, and no more crosses without Christ upon them!

    Great indeed is man’s evil, but we fall utterly silent,

    For now God is over it all, He who has come not to explain, but to fulfill.

    ↩︎

33. Trans. note: Earlier, I translated as “act of man,” despite the ambiguity between a “human act” and an “act of man” (i.e., an act performed by man), due to the instrumentality of Christ’s human nature in this act (though in such instrumentality the human act remains truly operative, even if superelevated). However, here, “act of man” would be too awkward an expression, and I have chosen to say “human act”, bearing in mind the instrumentality of the human nature of Christ, especially in the mystery of His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.↩︎

34. S. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 10, 5 (PL 41, col. 282): “Sacrificium ergo visibile invisibilis sacrificii sacramentum, id est, sacrum signum, est.”↩︎

35. ST III, q. 48, a. 3: “Sacrificium proprie dicitur aliquid factum in honorem proprie Deo debitum, ad eum placandum. Et inde est quod Augustinus dicit, in 10 de Civ. Dei : "Verum sacrificium est omne opus quod agitur ut sancta societate Deo inhaereamus, relatum scilicet ad illum finem boni quo veraciter beati esse possumus." Christus autem, ut ibidem subditur, "seipsum obtulit in passione pro nobis", et hoc ipsum opus quod voluntarie passionem sustinuit, fuit Deo maxime acceptum, utpote ex caritate proveniens. Unde manifestum est quod passio Christi fuit verum sacrificium.”↩︎

36. Ibid., ad 3: “Passio Christi ex parte occidentium ipsum fuit maleficium, sed ex parte ipsius ex caritate patientis fuit sacrificium. Unde hoc sacrificium ipse Christus obtulisse dicitur, non autem illi qui eum occiderunt.”↩︎

37. Trans. note: It was also tempting to render the reflexive here as “who gives Himself to Him”, but that does not seem to be the point here. Nonetheless, it reminds me of something that Journet liked to say (I believe taken from St. John of the Cross but founded on the best of theology) that through charity we are capacitated to give God back to God.↩︎

38. ST III, q. 22, a. 4, ad 1: “Sancti qui erunt in patria non indigebunt ulterius expiari per sacerdotium Christi, sed, expiati jam, indigebunt consommari per ipsum Christum, a quo gloria eorum dependet, ut dicitur Apoc. 21, 23, quod claritas Dei illuminat illam, scilicet civitatem sanctorum, et lucerna ejus est Agnus.”↩︎

39. Cf. ST III, q. 49, a. 2 (“Whether we have been freed from the power of the devil through Christ’s passion”).↩︎

40. Cf. ST III, q. 8, a. 7 (“Whether the devil is the head of the wicked”).↩︎

41. Cf. ST III, q. 46, a. 3 (“Whether man could have been liberated in another manner which would have been more fitting than through the passion of Christ”): “Fifthly, because this contributed to greater dignity, so that just as man had been defeated and deceived by the devil, so too man should be the one to defeat the devil; and just as man had deserved death, so too man by dying should overcome death...”↩︎