The act of conversion to God is not in its formal nature greater than all creatures, nor was even the love of Christ. A good angel, or a mere man conceived without sin by the power of the Holy Ghost, could have made satisfaction for the whole race, had God chosen to accept it; nor will Anselm's objection hold good, that we should have been more bound to him than to God, for all his merit would have been derived from God, as is all the merit of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. Christ suffered for righteousness' sake, seeing the sins of the Jews and their ill regulated and perverted affection for their law, so that they sacrificed its moral to its ceremonial precepts; "wishing, therefore, to withdraw them from error by His works and discourses, He preferred dying to keeping silence, for then the Jews had to listen to the truth, and thus He died for righteousness' sake." He offered His Passion to the Father for us, and we are not the less, but the more indebted to Him for doing so, since He might have redeemed us without it. It is clear how this part of the Scotist system, which was substantially adopted by the Franciscan William Occam and the Nominalist school generally, cuts at the roots of the Thomist, and still more of the Anselmic conception of the question. For an infinite merit it substitutes a voluntary acceptance, while the denial of an infinite debt removes any plea for the necessity of an infinite satisfaction. There are certainly parts of the scheme which are difficult to reconcile with the inherent distinction of good and evil, and look as if morality had no independent existence, but were an arbitrary creation of the Divine will. Nor is it consistent with the reality of the hypostatic union to ascribe an only finite character to the human, or, as they are sometimes called, theandric' actions of the God-man.* At the same time, the Scotist view, as a whole, is more consistent than the Thomist, which rejects the necessity of the sufferings of Christ, while laying so predominant a stress on the idea of satisfaction. But there was in fact another, and far more fundamental, difference between the 'subtle' and 'angelic' doctors, in their way of regarding the Atonement, which, if it did not at the time exercise so perceptible an influence over their modes of expression, could not but make itself in the long run more deeply felt; for it materially affected the relative importance and bearings of the whole question. I refer to their opposite views of the primary motive of the Incarnation. This, according to Aquinas, was the redemption of fallen man. If there had been no sin, Christ would not have come in the flesh; in the prevision of His conception was included the prevision of His cross. Against this Duns Scotus urges, that His human nature was predestined antecedently to the Fall, and was the model on which ours was formed; and that Christ would, in any case, have come to be the Second Adam and Head of the mystical body.† He considers this view most congruous to the honour of God; most accordant with the testimony of Scripture, especially in such passages as the first chapters of the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, and not inconsistent with the language of the Fathers, who need not mean more, when they *The Bull of Clement VI. Unigenitus (1343) implicitly condemns this portion of Scotus' system. Joann. Duns Scoti Summa, Pars III. Quæst. i. Art. 3. (Opp. tom. iv. Rome, seem to contradict it, than that Christ would not have come in a passible body, if we had not sinned. To enter on a detailed discussion of the scriptural argument would be out of place here. It is sufficient to observe, that the line of interpretation suggested by Scotus certainly opens out to us a deeper meaning in many passages of Holy Writ, both in the Old and New Testament; while such statements as that of our Lord Himself, that He is come 'to seek and to save that which is lost,' and the noble supplication of the hymn founded upon it,* miss none of their constraining force, even if it be true that He would have come to be our Brother, though we had needed no redemption. As regards the Fathers, an opinion has already been expressed, that the Scotist view of the Incarnation is most consistent with the general spirit of their teaching; but the question never came directly before them for adjudication. The greater number of passages quoted by advocates of the opposite side, such as Thomassin and Petavius, though not all of them, may be understood as stating the purposes for which Christ actually did come, after we had fallen, or as referring to the altered conditions under which He came, in a corruptible body, or as meaning that but for our sins He would not have died on the cross. Neither, indeed, if it could be shown that some or most of the Fathers express or imply the converse of an opinion, which in their day had never been put forward, would it at all follow that the opinion was not in fact a legitimate development of their belief. What is certain is, "Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa Tuæ viæ, "Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus; that they attach to the 'sacrament' or 'economy' of the Incarnation, considered in itself and apart from the Passion, a significance quite disproportionate to what it bears in many later schemes of doctrine. And more, while most of them regard the death of Christ as a ransom paid to Satan, none hold such a payment to have been necessary for our redemption. The Anselmic notion of its exclusive, or almost exclusive object being the discharge of a debt to God, incurred by sin, and still more the Lutheran idea of a literal punishment of our sins inflicted vicariously by the Father on His spotless Son, are foreign to their whole habit of thought. On the contrary, their way of looking at the matter seems to imply a belief, that in any case the predestined method for perfecting our nature, and bringing us into full communion with God, was the Incarnation of His Son. We have seen, again, how some of the greatest Fathers, like St. Augustine, are specially careful to point out the priority of the idea of sacrifice to the idea of sin, and in this they are followed by later Catholic divines. Sacrifice is the spontaneous expression of the homage due from the creature to his Creator, and the purest Heathen sacrifices were those which simply expressed this idea. Sin impressed on it, as on all human acts of devotion, an additional character of reparation. But from the beginning it was not so. If man had never fallen, the most perfect sacrifice would still have been offered to the Eternal Father in the human life, though not in the death, of Jesus; for it is the will that consecrates the outward act. Oblatus est quia Ipse voluit. To repeat once more the memorable words of St. Bernard, Non mors sed voluntas sponte morientis placuit. Without the Fall there would have been no Passion; perhaps, but only perhaps, there would have been no Eucharist. The earliest recorded type of communion is the tree of life in Paradise, the great prefigurement of the Christian sacrifice is the bloodless offering of Melchisedec, and that was not a sacrifice for sin. It is anyhow beyond dispute, that the Incarnation need not presuppose the Fall. A few words will suffice to indicate the bearing of the Scotist theory, which, though by no means universally accepted, has obtained the general suffrage of the later Church, on our way of regarding the Atonement. The very title of the Cur Deus Homo loses its meaning in the sense in which the author applied it. Theories about ransom and satisfaction, though not therefore rejected, sink into subordination to a higher truth, when the Incarnation is no longer looked upon as a merciful after-thought, to remedy man's corruption and make reparation to the wounded majesty of God, but as the fulfilment of an eternal purpose, modified indeed, but only modified, by sin into a deeper act of love. Bethlehem and Calvary are transfigured with a more exceeding brightness, yet the brightness of a sunshine all our own, when they are seen to reveal, under the conditions of time, and the pathetic incidents suited to our fallen state, the unutterable yearning of a Love which knows no change, to win our hearts, and make our natures His. The full extent of the difference between these two theories did not, as has already been remarked, make itself felt at once. We sometimes find St. Thomas using language that would seem rather to belong to |