The Man of Sorrows
St. Thomas Aquinas not only composed the Mass and Office of Corpus Christi, at the request of the pope, but also a Eucharistic hymn for his own private use, the Adoro te devote. In the penultimate stanza of this hymn, he declares that one drop of the Blood of Christ would have been able to free all mankind from all crimes. Since Christ is a divine Person, and since His human soul has the unsurpassable fullness of charity befitting a soul thus united to the Word, each of His voluntary acts and sufferings on earth had an unlimited power to merit for mankind. Nevertheless, Christ did not wish to redeem us by anything less than the Cross; and St. Thomas, in his Summa, teaches that our Lord in His Passion suffered more than any other person on earth has ever suffered.
The French Dominican Roger-Thomas Calmel (1914-75) observes in his work Les Grandeurs de Jesús-Christ that the decision of our Lord to suffer for us so immensely, even though this was in a sense not ‘necessary,’ is a great mystery. Certainly, Father Calmel points out, we can put forward reasons why it was ‘fitting’ for Christ so to act. We can say that He wished to offer to His Father a satisfaction and therefore a glory that would be super-abundant. We can say that He wished to be the model for holy men and women in all their various tribulations. Yet none of these explanations constitutes a strict demonstration of why the Cross was necessary. “In the end,” writes Fr. Calmel, “there is only one answer: it pleased God so to do. God has a way of loving that is proper to Himself. God, in His Christ, loves us as God.”
But in what way did the sufferings of our Lord in His passion surpass those of all others? St. Thomas, in answering this question, combines precision and piety. He distinguishes between the pains of the body and the pains, or sorrows, of the soul. We can think first of the bodily sufferings of Jesus. How extensive they were: “In His head He suffered from the crown of piercing thorns; in His hands and feet, from the fastening of the nails; on His face from the blows and spittle; and from the lash over His entire body.”
The pains extended also over Christ’s five bodily senses: “He suffered in touch, being scourged and nailed; in taste, being given vinegar and gall to drink; in smell, being fastened to the gibbet in the place that is called Calvary, stinking with dead bodies; in hearing, assailed with the voices of blasphemers and scorners; in sight, seeing His Mother and the disciple whom He loved, weeping.”
The kind of death that His enemies had prepared for Him was also supremely bitter. “The death of those nailed to a cross is most painful, since they are pierced through in places that are most sensitive, the hands and the feet, while the very weight of the body as it hangs increases the pain; and along with this is the prolongation of the pain, since they do not die straightaway, as do those slain by the sword.”
St. Thomas bids us think also of the unique sensitiveness of our Savior’s body. He quotes a saying of St. John Chrysostom, that things made miraculously are better than those made by nature. The wine that God provided for the wedding of Cana, for example, was the best wine. Likewise, the human body of Jesus, having been miraculously fashioned by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin, was perfect of constitution. But in consequence of this, “His sense of touch, from which pain results, was most keen.”
At the same time, Fr. Calmel observes that since the sufferings of Christ had to be proportioned to the salvation of the human race and to His dignity as the Son of God, there were some kinds of bodily sufferings that God would not permit to be inflicted on Him. God willed that in the very midst of His bodily humiliation, His Son should preserve even an outward dignity, something which also forms part of the credibility of the gospel. “There are some forms of torture, dreamed up by sick and perverted men, which were not for the Word of God to undergo. He suffered more than they do who undergo such things; yet these things were not for Him to suffer.” Doubtless this French author had in mind, among other things, some of the torture chambers of the second world war. He adds: “When some of the children of Adam, members—at least potentially—of His mystical body, are delivered up to such horrors, Christ, who from love suffered as no one else will ever do, is very close to these poor creatures, in all His majesty as the risen Redeemer, so that they may pass through the way of darkness that He has allowed them to experience, into the light and peace of His holy Passion.”
But can we really speak of peace in connection with our Lord’s Passion? This brings us to the second great part of our meditation: namely, what St. Thomas calls Christ’s “inward sorrow.” But here we need to follow a supernatural light in order not to err on one side or the other.
It belongs to the Church’s faith in the incarnation to hold that our Lord Jesus Christ, in His human nature, always had the vision of God, from the first moment of His conception. Nor did He lose this vision, even in the midst of His sufferings in the garden of Gethsemane, at the pillar in Pilate’s court, or on Calvary. But this vision of God necessarily yields an unimaginable bliss; for how could anyone see the Father, who is goodness itself, and not be made happy?
John Calvin misrepresented this Catholic doctrine. He supposed, or claimed, that Catholic theologians hold that our Lord suffered only in His body, and not in His soul. Calvin did not understand the mystery that in Christ the highest ‘fruition’ and the highest suffering could co-exist; and so he rejected this mystery. He went to the opposite extreme from the one that he falsely said that Catholic theology occupied. He claimed, blasphemously, that in His Passion our Lord suffered the pains of the damned.
What is the golden mean? How are we to gain some insight into the keenness of our Lord’s spiritual suffering, but without attributing to Him the despair and darkness of lost souls? We may begin by thinking of the objects that caused Christ’s inward pain. St. Thomas mentions three. “First, all the sins of the human race, for which He made satisfaction by suffering; hence He ascribes them, so to speak, to Himself, saying in Psalm 21: The words of my sins.” Notice that phrase ‘so to speak’ (quasi, in Latin). Our Lord did not really mistake Himself for a sinner, nor did God the Father really see His Son as sinful, as Luther imagined. But Christ’s love for men led Him to pray for them as intensely as if He were the one who needed to be delivered from sin.
The second cause of Christ’s sadness, says the angelic doctor, was “the fall of the Jews and of the others who sinned in His death, chiefly the apostles, who were scandalized at His Passion.” The apostles, save Judas, would soon recover; but the choice made by His people and their rulers would not be so quickly reversed. How grievous it must have been, about the sixth hour on Good Friday, for Israel’s Messiah to hear the chief priests cry out: We have no king but Caesar.
Only He could truly perceive the depth of all such evils, and therefore only He could grieve for them as they deserved.
The third thought that caused Christ’s sorrow was “the loss of His bodily life, something naturally horrible to human nature.” The philosopher Aristotle once made a strange but profound remark about courage. He said that the courageous man has a greater cause for fearing death than the coward, since the courageous man has something finer to lose by his death than does the coward, namely, a virtuous life. Christ’s life was far nobler than anything Aristotle could have conceived; why then should we be surprised if He felt sorrow at the thought of losing it? And he taketh Peter and James and John with him; and he began to fear and to be heavy (Mk. 14:33).
One might object: “But the martyrs often went to their deaths light-heartedly.” Indeed they did; St. Thomas More was still making merry quips as he climbed the scaffold and as he arranged his beard on the block. In the martyrs, the joy that naturally springs from a deep faith often eclipsed the natural fear of death. But with Jesus Christ, things were otherwise. He willed that the joy of the beatific vision, which would otherwise have rendered even the slightest sorrow or pain impossible, should produce no effect during His Passion. Joy and peace were not extinguished in Him, since the vision remained; but by a kind of miracle, they did not lesson His sorrow at the sight of men’s sins, at the loss of souls, at the treachery of Judas, at the flight of the apostles, and at the apostasy of the chief priests and the misstep of Israel. St. Thomas writes that joy remained only in ‘the higher part’ of Christ’s soul. We may think of that soul during its Passion as like some high mountain buffeted by a tremendous storm, but whose summit, invisible beyond the clouds, is serene in the sun-light.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? These words of the psalm, spoken from the Cross, did not express any wavering in His filial confidence. But He wished to show by them that His physical and mental sufferings were not lessened, during the Passion, by His vision of the Father, and that He was, in that sense, and by His free choice, at the limit of what His human nature could bear. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
TITLE IMAGE: The Crown of Thorns, Heinrich Lützelmann, c. 1485.
CRUCIFIXION: [www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-cristiano/sala-degli-indirizzi/artista-limosino--storie-della-passione-di-cristo.html].
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