Since
the earliest days of the Church, theologians have struggled to
understand how humanity and divinity coexisted in the person of Christ.
Proponents of the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus could not have
been fully divine, found significant scriptural evidence of their
position: Jesus wondered, questioned, feared, suffered, and prayed. The
defenders of orthodoxy, such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan,
Jerome, and Augustine, showed considerable ingenuity in explaining how
these biblical passages could be reconciled with Christ's divinity.
Medieval theologians such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and
Bonaventure, also grappled with these texts when confronting the rising
threat of Arian heresy. Like their predecessors, they too faced the need
to preserve Jesus' authentic humanity and to describe a mode of
experiencing the passions that cast no doubt upon the perfect divinity
of the Incarnate Word. As Kevin Madigan demonstrates, however, they also
confronted an additional obstacle. The medieval theologians had
inherited from the Greek and Latin fathers a body of opinion on the
passages in question, which by this time had achieved normative cultural
status in the Christian tradition. However, the Greek and Latin fathers
wrote in a polemical situation, responding to the threat to orthodoxy
posed by the Arians. As a consequence, they sometimes found themselves
driven to extreme and sometimes contradictory statements. These
statements seemed to their medieval successors either to compromise the
true divinity of Christ, his true humanity, or the possibility that the
divine and human were in communication with or metaphysically linked to
one another. As a result, medieval theologians also needed to
demonstrate how two equally authoritative but apparently contradictory
statements could be reconciled-to protect their patristic forebears from
any doubt about their unanimity or the soundness of their orthodoxy.
Examining the arguments that resulted from these dual pressures, Madigan
finds that, under the guise of unchanging assimilation and transmission
of a unanimous tradition, there were in fact many fissures and
discontinuities between the two bodies of thought, ancient and medieval.
Rather than organic change or development, he finds radical change,
trial, novelty, and even heterodoxy.
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