90. Did the incarnate Son of God have a soul with human knowledge?

90. Did the incarnate Son of God have a soul with human knowledge?

(Comp 90) The Son of God assumed a body animated by a rational human soul. With his human intellect Jesus learned many things by way of experience; but also as man the Son of God had an intimate and immediate knowledge of God his Father. He likewise understood people’s secret thoughts and he knew fully the eternal plans which he had come to reveal.

“In Brief”

(CCC 482) Christ, being true God and true man, has a human intellect and will, perfectly attuned and subject to his divine intellect and divine will, which he has in common with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

To deepen and explain

(CCC 471) Apollinarius of Laodicaea asserted that in Christ the divine Word had replaced the soul or spirit. Against this error the Church confessed that the eternal Son also assumed a rational, human soul (Cf. Damasus 1: DS 149). (CCC 472) This human soul that the Son of God assumed is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, this knowledge could not in itself be unlimited: it was exercised in the historical conditions of his existence in space and time. This is why the Son of God could, when he became man, "increase in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man" (Lk 2:52), and would even have to inquire for himself about what one in the human condition can learn only from experience (Cf. Mk 6 38; 8:27; Jn 11:34; etc.). This corresponded to the reality of his voluntary emptying of himself, taking "the form of a slave" (Phil 2:7). (CCC 473) But at the same time, this truly human knowledge of God's Son expressed the divine life of his person (Cf. St. Gregory the Great, "Sicut aqua" ad Eulogium, Epist. Lib. 10, 39: PL 77, 1097A ff.; DS 475). "The human nature of God's Son, not by itself but by its union with the Word, knew and showed forth in itself everything that pertains to God" (St. Maximus the Confessor, Qu. Et dub. 66: PG 90, 840A). Such is first of all the case with the intimate and immediate knowledge that the Son of God made man has of his Father (Cf. Mk 14:36; Mt 11:27; Jn 1:18; 8:55; etc.). The Son in his human knowledge also showed the divine penetration he had into the secret thoughts of human hearts (Cf. Mk 2:8; Jn 2 25; 6:61; etc.).

On reflection

(CCC 470) Because "human nature was assumed, not absorbed" (GS 22 § 2), in the mysterious union of the Incarnation, the Church was led over the course of centuries to confess the full reality of Christ's human soul, with its operations of intellect and will, and of his human body. In parallel fashion, she had to recall on each occasion that Christ's human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it. Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from "one of the Trinity". The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity. In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity (Cf. Jn 14:9-10): The Son of God … worked with human hands; he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin (GS 22 § 2). (CCC 474) By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal (Cf. Mk 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34; 14:18-20, 26-30). What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal (Cf. Mk 13:32, Acts 1:7).

(Next question: How did the two wills of the incarnate Word cooperate?)