Finishing off our discussion of rational animals from yesterday, we continue:
***
Indeed, the medieval mind would take this very far, even granting (in popular legend, not in the Church’s actual teaching) the rank of saint to a dog-headed man.
Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads. When he saw how much the Christians suffered he was indignant and left the city. He began to adore God and prayed. ‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘give me the gift of speech, open my mouth, and make plain thy might that those who persecute thy people may be converted.’ An angel of God came to him and said: ‘God has heard your prayer.’ The angel raised Christopher from the ground, and struck and blew upon his mouth, and the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired.[1]
So far from being unimaginative bigots who thought you must look human to be human, medievals understood that a rational soul was all you needed. If you had that, you were human. And if human, then eligible for redemption–if you came of a race of sinners as we do.
Which brings us to the second error we need to correct: when someone complains “Why would anybody suppose God admires us so much as to become one of us?” the assumption lurking at the bottom of that objection is that the Incarnation was some kind of reward. It was not.
For Our Salvation
I sometimes imagine the moment at which the unfallen, sinless aliens from Regulus V touch down on the White House lawn in their mother ship. The delegation of United Nations representatives is hastily assembled, the alien translator devices are distributed, the worldwide televised event begins, and the Regulan ambassador says, “People of Earth! This day is one of profound wonder for us! Ever since our planetary archangels told us that the supernova of MK149797 two thousand of your earth years ago heralded the moment when God chose to take human form on your world, we have longed to meet you and discover what you could possibly have done to merit this unthinkable honor! Now that our long interstellar voyage is over, we wish only to know: What did your species do to welcome him?“
Pity the poor schlub tasked with telling Perfect Innocence that story.
Bottom line: God did not become man because we are so wonderful, but for our salvation. It is our wretchedness that drew the attention of divine compassion. He came, not to say, “Way to go!” but to rescue us from the disastrous pit of sin into which our race fell at the dawn of our history.
The Incarnation was undertaken by God, not as a prize for our perfection, but as the desperate remedy for our fatal illness called sin. Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; Jesus did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (cf. Mark 2:17). That is what Christmas is all about. It is the equivalent of D-Day in salvation history. It is the moment when God stormed the beaches of time and space to invade Occupied Earth and destroy an empire that dwarfs the Third Reich: the devil’s empire of sin and death encompassing the whole world.
Sinners in Adam
To say the above is to say something very unpopular: that we require saving–that there is something wrong with us–something so desperately wrong, in fact, that we cannot save ourselves and only God can save us. Curiously, the same people who deny the existence of God due to the monstrous evils human beings commit (the Holocaust is an archetypal example) also often deny the reality of sin. As Chesterton observed:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.… If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.[2]
The Creed, as is typical, does not propose a debate on this point and assumes that if you are going to accept the Christian faith, you are willing to accept the reality of sin as a fact about the human race and, most importantly, about yourself. As St. Paul summarized our predicament: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
How we became sinners is tackled through a doctrine presumed, but not articulated or defined, by the Creed. It is the biblical idea that “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (Romans 5:12).
Of which more tomorrow.
[1] For a fuller account of this and other curious medieval legends about non-human intelligent races, see Michael Flynn’s “St. Christopher, ET, and the Middle Ages” available at https://strangenotions.com/st-christopher-et-and-the-middle-ages/ as of June 27, 2018.
Advertisement
