“More Splendid than the Sun”: Christ’s Flesh among the Reasons for the Incarnation

This article defends two arguments proposed by Robert Grosseteste for the view that the Incarnation is logically prior to the Fall. Each of them is motivated by the goodness of Christ as a creature who is nonetheless worthy of worship, though the first considers this fact as an intrinsic good, and the second considers it as instrumentally good, by virtue of its making possible fleshly communion between God and his creatures. I will then consider Bonaventure’s reasons for rejecting these arguments, which turn on the worry that they posit a divine obligation to become Incarnate. I show that while Bonaventure’s concern is reasonable, he addresses it at the unacceptable cost of denying important aspects of the Incarnation’s purpose in the actual world. However, Bonaventure accepts that the Incarnation and Passion are “necessary” for human redemption in a way that is consistent with divine freedom, an intuition which Aquinas brings to particularly clear expression by analyzing the Incarnation as necessary in the sense of being the most fitting means of salvation. Applying this line of thought to Christ’s flesh, considered as the fitting instrument by which God has elected to perfectly beatify humanity, allows us to reconcile Grosseteste’s insistence on the Incarnation’s priority to the Fall with Bonaventure’s insistence on its absolute gratuity.     

The Devil's Envy: On Christ as Angelic Justifier and Demonic Stumbling Block

At least since Augustine, Christian theology, especially but not only in the Latin West, has been dominated by an account of angelic origins in which the Incarnation was a response to humanity’s fall, itself occasioned by the prior angelic fall, whose cause in turn was the proud desire to be like God. (We’ll call this the ‘pride-account’). Nonetheless, that Augustinian view has been balanced from the beginning by an ‘envy-account’, which stresses instead Wisdom’s claim, ‘Through the Devil’s envy, death entered the world’ (Wisd. 2:24). The earliest extra-biblical versions of the envy-account – developed in the Latin, Syriac, and Arabic ‘Life of Adam and Eve’ traditions – take the object of Satan’s envy to have been Adam in particular. In the thirteenth century, however, Robert Grosseteste, as part of his extended defense of the idea that the Son would have been incarnate even without sin, argued instead that the Devil and his angels fell in rejecting the to-be-incarnate Christ, whose merits serve to ‘justify’ not only unfallen humanity, but even the holy angels. On this view, which arguably has biblical roots in Hebrews 1 and Revelation 12, and which reached its apogee in Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘the Devil’s envy’ was directed at the God-man in particular.     

Book reviews

The Many Faces of Science: An Introduction to Scientists, Values and Society, Leslie Stevenson & Henry Byerly, 1995. Oxford, Westview Press

Reason, Truth and Self: The Postmodern Reconditioned, Michael Luntley, 1995. London, Routledge xv + 247 pp., hb ISBN 0 415 118522

John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, Sidney Hook, 1995. New York, Prometheus xviii + 242 pp., hb ISBN 0 87975 9852

The Logical Status of Diagrams, Sun‐Joo Shin, 1994. Cambridge, CUP xii + 197 pp.     

Computers and pedagogy: Replacing telling with interactive computer-programmed instruction

Programmed instruction has been overlooked as a way of implementing more intensive application of learning principles, possibly because it has not been well understood. Today, most of the hardware problems of past teaching machines have been solved. Instructors can now expand their effectiveness and productivity by shifting to the creation of both classroom tests and computer-interactive tutorials, a change that would leave more time for personal interaction with students. But a better understanding of the contingency of reinforcement and the science in which this concept has evolved is necessary. The computer as a teaching machine has yet to be fully exploited.