Medieval Christian Theology: The Incarnation
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father." — John 1:14 For the theologians of the early Church, the development of a proper understanding of the Incarnation—the enfleshed, historical manifestation on earth of the Second Person of the invisible Triune God—was as vital a task as formulating the doctrine of the Trinity. And, along with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation distinguished Christianity definitively from the other religions of the ancient Mediterranean, both Abrahamic and pagan. Indeed, it is axiomatic to almost all historical versions of Christianity—ancient, medieval, and modern—to regard Jesus Christ as the God-man, both God and human, both mortal and immortal, fully human and also fully divine. In the language of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), Christ possessed two natures—perfect humanity and perfect divinity—joined together in a hypostatic union, that is, two natures brought harmoniously together in the Second Person of the Trinity.
Here too lies a paradox or contradiction. As with the Trinity, the full doctrine of the Incarnation is not a biblical concept but rather a theological explanation of the many things said about Christ, or that Christ said about himself, in the various books of the New Testament. Even the Gospel accounts are not ideally clear. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, for instance, both present genealogies that trace Jesus’s lineage—through his father Joseph—to the ancient patriarchs; and yet both gospels also give an account of his miraculous divine conception by the Holy Spirit and birth from the Virgin Mary. Even the more taciturn Gospel According to Mark calls Jesus both “the Son of Man” and “the Son of God.” The Gospel According to John, already several steps closer to what |
would emerge as Trinitarian orthodoxy, identifies the man Jesus as the Word (Logos) of God, but it never satisfactorily clarifies exactly how divinity and humanity meet in Jesus, or why such a meeting is significant.
Where the Gospels, perhaps because they are governed by narrative constraints, are unclear, the New Testament letters of St Paul suggest at least a partial answer to this puzzle. In the Epistle to the Philippians, Paul draws upon what was likely a very early Christian hymn: "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was born in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death upon a cross" (Philippians 2:5-8). In Paul’s account, which formed the basis for most subsequent understanding of Christ’s nature, the Incarnation was thus an act of humbling and emptying, of
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God allowing himself to become human in order to uniquely interact with other humans and to participate in the course of human events. Paul's language—which is echoed at many other places in the New Testament—links Christ to the figure of the Suffering Servant from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah: “He was despised and rejected by men; / a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; / and as one from whom men hide their faces / he was despised, and we esteemed him not. / Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. / But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; / upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, / and with his stripes are we healed” (Isaiah 53:3-6). Isaiah, and Paul in Philippians and elsewhere, focuses on how the very humility of this Servant—made lower still by the scorn and torture he willingly submits to—makes him an efficacious stand-in (or scapegoat … or sacrifice) for the sins of the people.
Other New Testament texts augment Paul’s understanding with other images. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, for instance, Christ’s Incarnation is a supreme act of revelation – of making visible the love and power of God. And in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ is said to function as the high priest who performs the sacrifice to God on behalf of humankind, a role that can only be properly fulfilled by a human. In all these cases, Christ’s role is both sacrificial—he makes propitiation to God for human sin and shortcoming—and also mediating, as he stands as a bridge between the visible and invisible, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. By taking on a mortal human body, writes the fourth-century theologian Athanasius, God "came to heal and teach suffering men," and he "ensured that men should recognise Him in the part who could not do so in the whole, and that those who could not lift their eyes to His unseen power might recognise and behold him in the likeness of themselves." The Incarnation of the divine Word, then, is also, fundamentally, an act of communication.
In terms of the development of Christian culture in the early period and into the Middle Ages, the ramifications of the Incarnation of God were manifold. Certainly, in regard to theology, the Incarnation entailed a special emphasis on two particular moments in the Gospel narrative: the events around Jesus’s birth from the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:26-35) and the Passion of Christ (Mark 15, Matthew 27, Luke 23, John 19). Both of these moments were the subject of countless manuscript illuminations, stained glass images, paintings, etc. With the Annunciation (Christ's conception by the Holy Spirit) and Nativity (his birth in a stable in Bethlehem), the emphasis was on the instant of the coming of God into the material world, the act of transcendence made immanent. With the Passion, the emphasis was on the pains of the mocking, scourging, and crucifixion of Jesus. These scenes were often brutally rendered in art, especially in the later Middle Ages. The devotional practice of the Stations of the Cross (Via Crucis), made popular by the Franciscans in the thirteenth century, provided one way for average believers to focus very palpably on the physical torments endured by their suffering God.
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Beyond theology and popular piety, the cultural impact of the doctrine of the Incarnation also affected, in the broadest sense, how the material world was regarded. Because God had chosen to assume a material body, the world of matter was thereby sanctified. This sense was bolstered by the fact that the risen Jesus, as the doubting disciple Thomas discovers to his surprise in John 20, is still fully enfleshed, wounds and all: the resurrected body is a material body, and, like the risen Jesus, faithful Christians fully expected to get their bodies back on the Day of Judgment. This valuation of the material body extended especially to the corpses of the saints. Early Christians settled near, and built churches atop of, the burial places of the saints; in later centuries the possession of a saint’s body, or even of a part of a saint’s body, was considered spiritually efficacious, and churches and abbeys often competed to obtain them. Objects associated with the saints—staffs, cups, scraps of clothing, etc.—were likewise considered holy and could themselves effect miracles.
At a deeper level, the Incarnation of Christ also spoke to the essential goodness of the material world; matter itself, after all was understood to be the creation of a benevolent God. This view of matter stands in stark contrast to the religious and philosophical views of the cultural milieu from which Christianity emerged: both Neoplatonists and Manichaeans regarded the material world as evil, something to be transcended or left behind in the pursuit of higher, more purely “spiritual” realities. However, even within early and medieval Christian thought itself, this positive view of materiality was often in conflict with a deep anxiety that the distractions of the body could cloud and corrupt the aspirations of the spirit. St Anthony, and countless hermits and monastics in his wake, actively resisted the pull of corporeal appetites, especially for food, drink, and sexual intercourse, and Pope Innocent III’s treatise On the Misery of the Human Condition (ca. 1195) emphasized the dark sway of material temptations. (Innocent’s proposed sequel on the goodness of God’s creation and of the human body/soul
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was tellingly never written.) Nonetheless, the fact that Christ had dwelt on earth in a human body—and, had risen from the dead and ascended into Heaven with that same body—signaled divine approval for the fact of material embodiment. As Francis of Assisi writes in his Laudes Creaturarum (ca. 1224), “Praise be to you, O Lord, through all your creatures!”
Christ’s full participation in the world of matter thus also had consequences for how medieval thinkers interpreted the world around them. Because Christ was both fully human and fully divine, so by analogy the world itself could both be what it is physically is while gesturing toward some higher reality at the same time. For instance, the planets—Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc.—could exist both as luminous physical objects while at the same time symbolizing ideas: war, love, justice, etc. (Chaucer, to farcical effect, takes this a step further in The Knight’s Tale when these “stars” actually also appear as the characters of the pagan gods for whom they are named.) Likewise, the great tradition of the medieval bestiaries rests on the idea that the natural world is a ”book” to be read. Hence, something like the ability of eagles to look directly into the sun can be interpreted as the ability of the godly to contemplate God. Or wolves in their rapacity,
Christ’s full participation in the world of matter thus also had consequences for how medieval thinkers interpreted the world around them. Because Christ was both fully human and fully divine, so by analogy the world itself could both be what it is physically is while gesturing toward some higher reality at the same time. For instance, the planets—Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc.—could exist both as luminous physical objects while at the same time symbolizing ideas: war, love, justice, etc. (Chaucer, to farcical effect, takes this a step further in The Knight’s Tale when these “stars” actually also appear as the characters of the pagan gods for whom they are named.) Likewise, the great tradition of the medieval bestiaries rests on the idea that the natural world is a ”book” to be read. Hence, something like the ability of eagles to look directly into the sun can be interpreted as the ability of the godly to contemplate God. Or wolves in their rapacity,
may have, they also inhabited the same reality that the Son of God had entered, and sanctified, in his flesh.
In a similar way, the doctrine of the Incarnation also undergirds the medieval predilection for allegory. Much medieval biblical exegesis is overtly allegorical: Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the Promised Land was read as a prefiguring of Christ’s leading sinners out of sin. Again, Moses is here both a figure for Christ and at the same time also the historical leader of the Hebrews against Pharaoh: he is both fully himself and simultaneously points beyond himself. Over time, this way of thinking fueled less strictly religious types of allegories. In The Romance of the Rose, for example, the Rose is a figure for the beloved while also not ceasing to be a rose. Likewise, figures like Lady Meed or Piers Plowman in Langland’s famous poem may start more as abstractions, little more than talking symbols, but take on an embodied life of their own as the story unfolds. Coming full circle, one of the more virtuosic allegorical moments in medieval literature is the pageant that Dante stages in the Garden of Eden atop Mount Purgatory. At its center is a mysterious griffon—half-lion, half-eagle. As the pilgrim beholds it, he finds he cannot comprehend its two natures at the same time, seeing it either as an eagle or a lion. As its position in the pageant makes clear, this griffon is a representation of Christ—both fully human and fully divine—and the pilgrim’s failure to grasp it in its simultaneity bears witness only to his own mortal shortcomings, and not to the power of the divine to inhabit, interpenetrate, and consecrate the material world.
In a similar way, the doctrine of the Incarnation also undergirds the medieval predilection for allegory. Much medieval biblical exegesis is overtly allegorical: Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the Promised Land was read as a prefiguring of Christ’s leading sinners out of sin. Again, Moses is here both a figure for Christ and at the same time also the historical leader of the Hebrews against Pharaoh: he is both fully himself and simultaneously points beyond himself. Over time, this way of thinking fueled less strictly religious types of allegories. In The Romance of the Rose, for example, the Rose is a figure for the beloved while also not ceasing to be a rose. Likewise, figures like Lady Meed or Piers Plowman in Langland’s famous poem may start more as abstractions, little more than talking symbols, but take on an embodied life of their own as the story unfolds. Coming full circle, one of the more virtuosic allegorical moments in medieval literature is the pageant that Dante stages in the Garden of Eden atop Mount Purgatory. At its center is a mysterious griffon—half-lion, half-eagle. As the pilgrim beholds it, he finds he cannot comprehend its two natures at the same time, seeing it either as an eagle or a lion. As its position in the pageant makes clear, this griffon is a representation of Christ—both fully human and fully divine—and the pilgrim’s failure to grasp it in its simultaneity bears witness only to his own mortal shortcomings, and not to the power of the divine to inhabit, interpenetrate, and consecrate the material world.
Further Reading
- Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. "A Religious of C. S. M. V.," intro. C. S. Lewis (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996)
- A Book of Beasts, trans. T. H. White (Capricorn Books, 1960)
- Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. Wulstan Hibberd (Ex Fontibus, 2018)
- Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford World's Classics, 2009)
- Francis of Assisi, "Laudes Creaturarum" in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis J. Armstrong, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1986)
- William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall, Exeter Mediaeval Texts and Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2005)
- C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Clarendon Press, 1936)
- John Saward, The Mysteries of March: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Incarnation and Easter, intro. Rowan Williams (Collins, 1990)
- Charles Singleton, "The Irreducible Dove," Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 129-135