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August 15, 2005
Ch. XVI. Q. 99. Causes of the Incarnation
THE MOVING cause of the Incarnation was the goodness and love of the Father. The efficient and operating cause was the Holy Spirit. The consenting and concurring cause was the Blessed Virgin. The conditioning cause was a miraculous conception.1
2. The goodness and love of the Father alone explain His being moved to send His Son into the world. Two points should be noted in this connection. In the first place, there was no merit on the human side that deserved such a benefit. The Manhood of Christ itself came into being by means of the Incarnation, so that its merit was an effect rather than a cause of that mystery.2 Secondly, it is erroneous to regard the Father's love as a consequence of the Son's Incarnation and death for mankind. The mystery of redemption was as truly caused by the Father's love as by that of the Son, who came to do the Father's will.3
3. No natural conception can of itself account for the fact that He who was conceived of the Virgin was the eternal Son of God. Jesus Christ was born not of blood simply, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.4 That is, the explanation of His birth lies in the fact that the Holy Spirit came upon the Blessed Virgin, and the power of the Highest overshadowed her.5
4. Yet the operation of the Holy Spirit, in causing the Blessed Virgin to conceive and bear the Son of God, was not fulfilled without the Virgin's faith and consent. If she had rejected the privilege offered to her, no doubt another maiden would have been found. She could not have defeated the divine purpose. But that the Incarnate should have had an unbelieving and unwilling mother obviously disagrees with the fitness of things.6
5. The conception of Christ was perfectly natural from the standpoint of His Person and purpose, and it could hardly fail to differ in method from the conception of a purely human child; for the causal antecedents of nativity determine the rank in being of what is born. But when considered from the standpoint of the native capacity of a human virgin, His conception was plainly supernatural and, in the order of sensible phenomena, miraculous. The effect - the entrance of very God into human life - transcends the potentialities of the sphere in which it emerged, and therefore demanded the working of a transcendant factor, the Holy Spirit; but this did not interrupt the continued validity of the laws of purely human birth. The event was not contra-natural, but super-natural.7
1 Incarnation, ch. iii. 2.
2 St.Thomas III. ii. 11.
3 St. John iii. 16-17; v. 17; xvii. 4, 6-8; Rom. v. 8; viii. 32; 2 Thess. ii. 16; Heb. x. 6-7; St. James i. 17-18; 1 St. John iv. 9-10. A.J. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, ch. vi. 7-10.
4 This is not an exegesis of St. John i. 13.
5 St. Luke i. 35. Incarnation. ch. iii. 9; St. Thomas, III. xxviii. 1-2; xxxii; Bp. Pearson, Creed, fol. pp. 164-181; A.J. Mason, ch. v. 4; W.H. Hutchings, Person and Work
of the Holy Ghost, pp. 72-75.
6 A.C.A. Hall, The Virgin Mother, pp. 49-57.
7 In re W. Sanday, Bp. Gore's Challenge to Criticism, esp. pp. 23-28. On the fact of the Virgin Birth, Chas. Gore, Dissertations, I; Jas. Orr, Virgin Birth; R.J. Knowling, Our Lord's Virgin Birth; T.J. Thorburn, Crit. Exam. of the Evid. for the Doctr. of the Virgin Birth; Ch. Quarterly Review, Oct. 1904, art. ix.
Posted by AKMA at August 15, 2005 11:17 AM