Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Thomas Morris says He did. His main shtick consists in distinguishing between being fully X and being merely X; for example:

Consider a diamond. It has all the properties essential to being a physical object (mass, spatiotemporal location, etc.). So it is fully physical. Consider now an alligator. It has all the properties essential to being a physical object. It is fully physical. But, there is a sense in which we can say that it is not merely physical. It has properties of animation as well. It is an organic being. In contrast, the gem is merely physical as well as being fully physical. (The Logic of God Incarnate, 66)

You see the pattern; man is fully alive, like our alligator, but not merely alive; he is higher on the metaphysical hierarchy due to being rational, etc. “And… [Aristotle] compares the various souls to the species of figures, one of which contains another; as a pentagon contains and exceeds a tetragon. Thus the intellectual soul contains virtually whatever belongs to the sensitive soul of brute animals, and to the nutritive souls of plants.” (ST, I, 76, 3) Similarly, Jesus is fully human but, unlike you and me, not merely human; he is also divine — both fully and merely, of course, because there is nothing higher than God.

Many properties “may be essential to being merely human, but they can be held, in all epistemic and metaphysical propriety, not to be essential to being fully human, to exemplifying the kind-essence of humanity.” (67) One such property may be “being a child of human parents.” What Jesus assumed then is our humanity, namely, body and soul, the kind-essence, rational animality. The latter included the will and the intellect. But what He most certainly did not assume is human personality, that is, a spirit, the individual-essence. A related distinction Morris draws is between common or even universal properties of human beings and their essential properties. The difference is between ∀(x)(Fx), ∀(x which have ever existed and will ever exist)(Fx), and N(Fx). Just because a property is actually, in this world, common to all (mere) men does not make it necessary.

Now (1) if the human will and intellect did not result in a personality which in Jesus was the personality of God the Son, then what purpose did they serve? Jesus had “[c]ommand and sympathy, power and charm, authority and affection, cheerfulness and gravity”; unparalleled “strength, poise, and grace.” Were these from His divine nature or from His human nature? I think these traits were shared between Christ’s natures, but they originated in His divinity. (2) Who controlled the body of Jesus, the divine person or the human soul? The human soul acted but through the medium of and in obedience to the divine and godlike virtues which themselves were adornments of his divine personality and constituted his individual essence. Jesus’s powers of acting came from His human soul, but His habits were divine. Christ had the virtues “most perfectly beyond the common mode. In this sense Plotinus gave to a certain sublime degree of virtue the name of ‘virtue of the purified soul’.” (ST, III, 7, 2, ad 2) And (3) what was the relationship between the divine nature/person and the human mind in Jesus? The person of God the Son comprehended God, while His human intellect enjoyed the beatific vision but without comprehending God. I think that any question Jesus’s human mind wanted to ask of the inner life of God it could ask and receive an answer from His divine mind. On the other hand, Jesus’s divine mind was enriched by the “free” knowledge of the actual world Jesus was obtaining during His life with us.