Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation

Abstract

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son of God is truly but only contingently a human being.But is it also the case that Christ's individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person?The affirmative answer to this question, explicitly espoused by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, turns out to be philosophically untenable, while the negative answer, which is arguably implicit in St. Thomas Aquinas, explication of the Incarnation, has some surprising and significant metaphysical consequences.Christians profess that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God and yet that he is also like us in all things but sin.One metaphysical consequence of this belief-a consequence explicitly affirmed by the Church in response to heresies such as Apollinarianism, Monothelitism and Monophysitism'-is that Christ's individual human nature (his "human part," so to speak)' is like every other individual human nature in its ontological constitution.So, for instance, if Cartesian dualism is correct, then Christ's individual human nature is an immaterial substance intimately but only accidentally related to a particular human body.On the other hand, if some version of Aristotelian hylomorphism is true, then Christ's individual human nature is a substance essentially composed of a particular body and a particular intellective soul.Corresponding conditionals hold for the various forms of materialism and emergentism that dominate the current philosophical scene, though at least some of these theories may well be incompatible with Christian doctrine taken as a whole.Be that as it may, in this paper I wish to focus on a relatively specific metaphysical question concerning Christ's individual human nature, a question that arises regardless of which of the philosophical theories just mentioned is correct.Christians have traditionally affirmed that the Son of God freely took on a human nature and hence is only contingently a human being.But what of the converse?Is it also true that Christ's individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person?Or, to put it more fashionably, using 'N' as a proper name of Christ's individual human nature: Is there a possible world w and a time t such that N exists at t in w without being united to a divine person?3

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