Introduction
Scholars have recently pointed out that Thomas Aquinas describes Christ's work of satisfaction as a ‘punishment’. On this basis, they have levelled two critiques against Aquinas: first, his union of punishment with satisfaction is a corruption of Anselm of Canterbury's satisfaction theory; second, Aquinas’ satisfaction theory provides a philosophical foundation for later atonement theories that fall within the genus of ‘penal substitution’. A thorough evaluation of these criticisms would require a close scrutiny of the soteriology of Aquinas, Anselm, and the proponents of penal substitution to whom Aquinas is said to bear a resemblance. This article will make an initial contribution to that greater project by providing a thorough explication and analysis of Aquinas’ teaching on the nature of the punishment that Christ endured on the cross and its purpose within his work of satisfaction for sin.
The structure of this work will unfold as follows. I will begin with an examination of the above-mentioned, contemporary treatments of Aquinas’ use of ‘punishment’ in his account of Christ's work of satisfaction. I will show that both those who are concerned with, and those who laud, Aquinas’ inclusion of punishment within satisfaction have failed to address two vital questions for the proper interpretation of Aquinas’ soteriology: first, what is punishment? Second, what role does punishment play in acts of satisfaction? I will then proceed to present Aquinas’ answers to these questions by explicating his teaching on the nature of satisfaction, punishment, and the relation between the two, as presented in the Summa Theologiae. I will focus especially upon how Aquinas uses these concepts in his explanation of the saving significance of Christ's Passion, and will conclude with a consideration of his teaching regarding humanity's participation in Christ's work of satisfaction. My thesis is that, for Aquinas, God did not will and delight in the suffering of Christ as an end in itself. Rather, God willed Christ's suffering as a fitting means to bring about the real healing and elevation of sinners in grace. Christ chose to endure the punishment of the Passion because the end of his saving mission and the type of actions needed to fittingly attain that end rendered his endurance of punishment necessary. The Satisfaction wrought by Christ on the cross, with all of the punishment that it involved, was not arbitrary. Rather, Christ's punishment manifests the wisdom and saving love of God for sinners.
I. Contemporary Criticisms of Thomistic Satisfaction
In his mature soteriological work, Jesus Our Redeemer, Gerald O'Collins connects Aquinas’ satisfaction theory with the doctrine of penal substitution. On the whole, O'Collins appreciates Aquinas’ soteriology and lauds his emphasis on the essential role of charity in acts of satisfaction for sin.Footnote 1 But, he claims that Aquinas understood satisfaction to be a ‘penance that involves a penal or punitive element, an element expressly excluded by Anselm’ of Canterbury in his foundational work on satisfaction theory, Cur Deus homo.Footnote 2 In this sense, Aquinas corrupted Anselm's theory. Further, by associating satisfaction with penal penances, O'Collins says that Aquinas ‘helped to prepare the way, sadly, for the idea of Christ being punished and so propitiating an angry God by paying a redemptive ransom’. He continues, ‘the way Aquinas adjusted Anselm's theory of satisfaction helped open the door to a sad version of redemption: Christ as a penal substitute who was personally burdened with the sins of humanity, judged, condemned, and deservedly punished in our place’. O'Collins interprets Aquinas’ logic as follows: salvation from sin requires satisfaction; Satisfaction involves suffering a penalty or punishment; Christ suffered this penalty on our behalf. Hence, fallen humans are saved from sin and reconciled to God. For O'Collins, such an articulation of satisfaction leads to the following conclusion: ‘through his death he [Christ] satisfied the divine justice, paid the required price, and propitiated an angry God’.Footnote 3 O'Collins thus thinks that Aquinas’ satisfaction theory lends itself to the notion that a wrathful God actively willed and delighted in the suffering of Christ as an end in itself.
O'Collins goes on to argue that the Council of Trent enshrined Aquinas’ penal interpretation of satisfaction. Trent describes Christ's sacrifice as an act of satisfaction in both its decree on justification and its teaching on the sacrifice of the Mass.Footnote 4 O'Collins takes no issue with the decree on justification, since it did not explicitly define ‘satisfaction’.Footnote 5 However, he is troubled by Trent's following statement on the Mass:
This sacrifice is truly propitiatory … For the Lord, appeased by this oblation, grants grace and the gift of repentance, and he pardons wrongdoing and sins … therefore, it [the Eucharist] is rightly offered according to apostolic tradition, not only for the sins, punishments, satisfaction, and other necessities of the faithful who are alive, but also for those who have died in Christ.Footnote 6
O'Collins says, ‘By aligning “satisfaction” with “punishments” and speaking of God being “appeased”,Footnote 7 the Council of Trent accepted penal elements which Aquinas and others had introduced into Anselm's theory’.Footnote 8 O'Collins concludes, ‘Satisfaction was now officially depicted as involving punishment’,Footnote 9 and so Aquinas’ misinterpretation of Anselm became a part of the authoritative magisterial teaching of the Church.Footnote 10 For O'Collins, Trent indicates that Christ satisfied for sin by enduring the punishment of the cross, a punishment that ‘appeased’ God. The implication is that Christ's saving work on the cross is reduced to the mere endurance of pain in order to satisfy a wrathful God's right to punish sinners.
O'Collins’ criticism of Aquinas was analyzed by Brandon Peterson. Peterson claims that O'Collins’ rejection of the word placare ‘arises from a linguistic misunderstanding’.Footnote 11 Modern English Christians who embraced forms of penal substitution tended to translate placare as ‘appease’ and used it to describe ‘an action intended to assuage the rage of another’. Yet, ‘Thomas uses the Latin placo in quite another way, namely, in the positive sense of “pleasing” another’.Footnote 12 Thus, when Aquinas says that God was placatus (pleased) by Christ's satisfaction, he is not using this term in the same way as it would be used later by proponents of penal substitution.
Yet, Peterson agrees with O'Collins regarding the claim that Aquinas modified Anselm's understanding of satisfaction. Peterson rightly points out that, according to Anselm, the order and harmony of creatures with God and one another is maintained by either punishment or satisfaction.Footnote 13 The two options are mutually exclusive, and satisfaction is the superior one. Conversely, ‘while Thomas has a dichotomy, punishment straddles both sides of it’.Footnote 14 Aquinas defines satisfaction ‘as a kind of punishment, rather than an alternative to it’.Footnote 15 For Aquinas, the form of satisfaction is charity, but ‘punishment serves as the “matter” of the act of satisfaction’.Footnote 16 In Peterson's view, Anselm does not specify that the matter of every act of satisfaction must involve suffering and pain, whereas Aquinas does. For Aquinas, the difference between punishment and satisfaction is merely formal; the former is affliction endured involuntarily, while the latter is suffering endured out of charity.Footnote 17
The claim that Aquinas’ soteriology can be linked to accounts of penal substitution has merit. Such a connection is explicitly made in a recent, esteemed evangelical defense of penal substitution. In Pierced for Our Transgressions, Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach identify Aquinas as a proponent of the idea that Christ's death was necessary to pay the debt of punishment that sinful human beings owed to God. Significantly, they do not claim that Anselm promoted such a view. They appeal to the classic teaching of Aquinas, among others, to show that penal substitution is not ‘a novel doctrine, invented around the time of the Reformation’. Rather, the thought of ancient theologians such as Justin Martyr, Augustine of Hippo, and Aquinas help to show that penal substitution ‘has indeed been the consensus of Christian orthodoxy for almost two millenia’.Footnote 18 According to these authors, Aquinas’ endorsement of penal substitution can be found in questions 47–50 of the third part of the Summa Theologiae.Footnote 19 There, Aquinas claims that God satisfies for human sin ‘by paying himself a debt we could not pay. This debt was the punishment due to us for our sin against him’.Footnote 20 The punishment which Christ endured in his Passion paid the debt which human beings owed to God, and in doing so ransomed sinners from slavery to the devil.Footnote 21 Hence, Aquinas provides ‘a clear statement of penal substitution: God must punish sin to maintain his justice, but Christ suffered in our place and freed us from this debt’.Footnote 22 Christ endured the suffering that sinful human beings deserved, satisfied the justice of God, and so opened up the possibility of salvation.
The problem with all of these treatments of Aquinas’ satisfaction theory is that they never go beyond the surface of Aquinas’ teaching. None of the above interpretations make any effort to define and explain Aquinas’ understanding of what constitutes a ‘punishment’. While Peterson is correct to identify punishment as that which constitutes the matter of satisfaction, he does not provide any further reflection upon what punishment is and how it is related to the essence and end of satisfaction. The role of punishment in the saving function of satisfaction is thus prematurely assumed to be the mere fulfilment of a seemingly arbitrary judicial requirement or, worse, the quenching of an angry deity's wrath. In order properly to understand and appreciate Aquinas’ satisfaction theory, the following questions need to be addressed: What is satisfaction? What is Punishment? How does punishment contribute to the end of satisfaction? I will now turn to the Summa Theologiae in order to explain how Aquinas answers these questions, and thus rectify the above misunderstandings of his satisfaction theory.
II. Aquinas on the Nature of Satisfaction
Thomas Aquinas situates the concept of ‘satisfaction’ within his account of justice and the virtue of penance. Penance is a species of justice, and satisfaction is an effect of the virtue of penance.Footnote 23 Justice requires that those who sin against another offer compensation for their offense. Penance is the virtue by which the offending party ‘grieves for the sin he has committed, inasmuch as it is an offense against God, and purposes to amend’.Footnote 24 Aquinas specifies, ‘Now amendment for an offense committed against anyone is not made by merely ceasing to offend, but it is necessary to make some kind of compensation’.Footnote 25 Brian Davies comments that Aquinas ‘does not think that things are made right between sinners and God simply because sinners stop sinning’.Footnote 26 Compensation is needed in order to eliminate, as much as possible, all of the destructive effects and consequences of the sin committed.Footnote 27 A person ‘makes satisfaction’ to God when, after acknowledging his guilt and grieving for his sins, he hands over a sufficient compensation to the Lord.Footnote 28
Satisfactory compensation involves the judgment of the victim and the free choice of the offender. Aquinas says, ‘in penance, the offense is satisfied according to the will of the sinner, and the judgment of God against whom the sin was committed’.Footnote 29 God determines the offering needed to justly compensate for the damages committed against his honor, and the sinner voluntarily hands over this gift of recompense.Footnote 30 The same rule applies to situations involving an offense between human beings. For example, the person who is fined by the state for speeding satisfies for their offense by choosing to pay the fine which their victim (the state, representing the community) has demanded.
Further, the compensation offered in satisfaction must be a gift which is abundantly pleasing to the victim. Aquinas explains, ‘He properly satisfies for an offense who offers something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offense’.Footnote 31 This means that human beings can only make satisfaction to God for their sins by offering a gift to him which is at least as pleasing to the divine will as their sins were displeasing.
Jesus offers to God the Father a perfect gift of recompense on behalf of the entire fallen human race. Aquinas says, ‘by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race’.Footnote 32 God willed to receive love and obedience from Christ. Christ loved and obeyed God even to the point of shedding his blood on the Cross. By this supreme act of love, Christ voluntarily handed over the gift that God desired to receive from him, and this gift was even more pleasing to God than the history of sin was displeasing.Footnote 33 The dignity of Christ's divine personhood rendered his gift of self-infinitely pleasing to the Father.Footnote 34 Further, as Thomas Joseph White explains, because Christ was fully divine, as a man he possessed beatific knowledge of the divine will, and this enabled him freely, knowingly to hand himself over to suffering and death ‘in a way no one else could’.Footnote 35
While it is grounded in the Incarnate love of the Son for the Father, Christ's satisfying work is not merely an exchange between the Father and Son, devoid of all concrete impact upon sinful human beings. Such a scenario would prevent Christ's Passion from properly being called ‘satisfaction’ since, as we have seen, Aquinas defines satisfaction as a penitential act which is ordered towards the destruction of the effects of sin. Consequently, in order to properly be called ‘satisfaction’, Christ's love and obedience amidst suffering and death must somehow heal broken human beings. Such healing of sinful humanity occurs, according to Matthew Levering, when Christ's cruciform love is ‘appropriated by each person through membership in Christ's body by faith and charity’.Footnote 36 Aquinas explains, ‘in order to secure the effects of Christ's passion, we must be likened unto him’.Footnote 37 He specifies, ‘Christ's Passion works its effect in them to whom it is applied, through faith and charity and the sacraments of faith’.Footnote 38 Through the infusion of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, sinful human beings are forgiven of their sins and united to Christ. As the members of the mystical body become perfectly conformed to the charity of Christ their head, they are offered through, with, and in Christ to the Father as a pleasing gift in satisfaction for all of their past sins. In this way, humans participate in the satisfaction brought about through Christ's passion.Footnote 39 Thus, as Rik Van Nieuwenhove remarks, ‘Insofar as we share in it [Christ's death] and allow ourselves to be changed, it takes away the sins of the world’.Footnote 40 Having established the basics of Aquinas’ teaching on satisfaction, we can proceed to consider more specifically the role that suffering or ‘punishment’ has in his account of Christ's satisfactory work.
III. The Nature of Poena and its Relation to Satisfaction
Our first task is to understand what Aquinas means by the Latin word poena, a word which Peterson and O'Collins consistently translate as ‘punishment’.Footnote 41 Aquinas defines Poena under the category of ‘evil’, but he distinguishes it from moral evil. ‘What St. Thomas classes malum poenae’, says Herbert McCabe, is ‘evil suffered by things’.Footnote 42 Peter Koritansky explains, ‘Because all evil consists in the privation of some good, Aquinas understands punishment to include all instances where rational creatures suffer harm of any kind’.Footnote 43 So, a person endures poena when they are experiencing something which is repugnant to their will, for example, ‘so-called natural evils such as disease and physical disability’.Footnote 44 Brian Davies adds, ‘Aquinas’ notion of malum poenae corresponds to a high degree to what authors other than Aquinas have referred to as ‘“naturally occurring evil,”’ such as ‘human illness or animal suffering, or even the wilting of a plant (certainly bad for the plant)’.Footnote 45
Aquinas employs poena in terms of ‘natural evil suffered’ in his treatment of the defects assumed by God the Son.Footnote 46 Christ assumed ‘bodily defects, namely death, hunger, thirst, and the like’. These defects ‘are the punishment of sin, which was brought into the world by Adam’.Footnote 47 Here, Aquinas explicitly equates poena with bodily defectus, and he identifies the cause of these defects.Footnote 48 He explains, ‘All particular defects of men are caused by the corruptibility and passibility of the body’.Footnote 49 Adam and his descendants experience bodily poena as a consequence of Adam's decision to sin and thus destroy the grace of original justice.Footnote 50 As Augustine Di Noia points out, original justice included ‘Freedom from bodily suffering and death’.Footnote 51 Further,
Because of his personal sin (peccatum originale originans), Adam lost the state of original justice that he would have been able to pass along with human nature to his posterity. The state of original sin in his posterity (peccatum originale originatum) is nothing other than the privation or absence of original justice and the resulting disorder in the powers that is called concupiscence.Footnote 52
Therefore, to say that Christ experiences bodily poena is simply to say that he is a human being who shares in the corporal passibility that every descendant of Adam experiences.Footnote 53
In addition to bodily suffering, poena includes material and internal privation. The goods lost through poena can consist in the ‘good of the soul, good of the body, and external goods’.Footnote 54 ‘External goods’ refers to human possessions such as money, shelter, or friendships. To lose such goods against one's will is to suffer a malum poenae. The soul experiences poena in several ways. First, insofar as it is the form of the body, the soul suffers in and with the body in all of the latter's pain. Second, the soul ‘suffers with an animal passion’, namely, ‘the affections of the sensitive appetite’.Footnote 55 Craig Steven Titus points out that such suffering in the sensitive appetite includes things as simple as Christ's experience of hunger.Footnote 56 This bodily hunger is accompanied by an internal sorrow of the mind at the recognition of an absent, sensible good.Footnote 57 Such bodily passions and the sorrow that accompanies them were not in Christ due to any disorder of his soul. Rather, as Paul Gondreau explains, ‘By virtue of a unique grace, Christ's affectivity instinctively and innately followed the good of reason, which ensured that every passion worked towards its natural end’.Footnote 58
Third, Christ's soul experienced suffering even in his rational will. Jesus’ soul experienced sorrow, fear, and anger not only towards material realities, but towards spiritual realities as well.Footnote 59 Aquinas explains, ‘the object and motive of sorrow is anything hurtful or evil interiorly apprehended by the reason or the imagination’.Footnote 60 Jesus’ soul grieved, was angered, and felt fear on account of his knowledge of immaterial realities such as sin and hell.Footnote 61 Reginald Gariggou-Lagrange specifies that Christ's rational appetite suffered not in its ‘higher reason’, the object of which is God, but rather in its ‘lower reason’, which ‘has to do with temporal things’, such as sin. ‘However’, he adds, ‘the sadness a just man experiences at the sight of sin comes from the ‘higher reason’ which contemplates the eternal law of God. Sin makes the just suffer chiefly inasmuch as it is an offense against God’.Footnote 62 In sum: the mind of Christ recognized the absence of spiritual and material goods, and this caused him to suffer the pain of sorrow in the lower part of his rational appetite as well as in his sensitive appetite.
Aquinas explicitly identifies sorrow as a form of poena. He says, ‘All sorrow is an evil of punishment (poenae), but it is not always an evil of fault, except only when it proceeds from an inordinate affection’.Footnote 63 Sorrow is painful, and it exists only in a fallen world, but this does not mean that the experience of sorrow is a sin or a purely negative event. While one would generally prefer not to be sorrowful, there are times when sorrow is reasonable, fitting, and virtuous. On this point Aquinas quotes St. Augustine, who says, ‘Whenever these affections follow reason, and are caused when and where needed, who will dare to call them diseases or vicious passions?’Footnote 64 Thus, as a ‘defect’ of the soul, sorrow (as well as anger and fear) is just as much a poena as any bodily defect. However, insofar as sorrow is an appropriate reaction to evil, whether spiritual or corporal, it is a manifestation of wisdom and charity.
We are now in a position to understand Aquinas’ description of Christ's Passion as a ‘punishment’. Aquinas’ intent in using this term is evident in his discussion of the various kinds and degrees of pain which Christ endured in the Passion.Footnote 65 He explains,
Christ suffered from friends abandoning Him; in His reputation, from the blasphemies hurled at Him; in His honor and glory, from the mockeries and the insults heaped upon Him; in things, for He was despoiled of His garments; in His soul, from sadness, weariness, and fear; in His body, from wounds and scourgings.Footnote 66
Here we see that Christ suffered external poena (social rejection and nakedness), corporal poena (scourging and crucifixion) and internal poena (sorrow and fear). Aquinas further specifies the objects of the sorrow that constituted Christ's internal pain. Christ grieved for (1) the sins of every human person in history, (2) especially for the sins of his Chosen People, his Apostles, and all those directly involved in his death, (3) the suffering and death of his body, ‘which is naturally horrible to human nature’.Footnote 67 Hence, we can see that Christ's Passion may properly be called a ‘punishment’ insofar as it involved suffering the loss of various kinds of goods.
We can now make some initial observations regarding the causal relationship between God's will and Christ's experience of corporal, external, and internal poena. The proximate causes of Christ's poena were (1) the passible human nature that God the Son chose to assume, (2) the natural forces of the world which afflicted Christ, such as heat, cold, etc. (3) the moral evil of those human beings directly involved in his Passion, and (4) the sins of humankind, the knowledge of which caused Christ to grieve. By directly choosing to assume a passible human nature, God the Son indirectly willed to endure the various forms of poena (2-4, above) to which that passible nature made him vulnerable. Yet, this is not the same as saying that God actively willed the suffering described in points 2–4. For example, a person who chooses to get married indirectly chooses to make themselves vulnerable to being an object of their spouse's scorn, or to grief on account of their spouse's premature death. Further, nothing in the notion of poena itself necessitates the conclusion that God directly wills corporal, external or internal suffering upon Jesus beyond that which is unavoidable to his passible nature (e.g. hunger, thirst, weariness, etc.). While God the Father could have actively afflicted his incarnate Son with migraine headaches, for instance, Aquinas’ exposition of the poena endured by Christ does not require such a view. In fact, Aquinas does not even suggest such a conclusion.
We can now begin to examine the connection between poena and satisfaction. Aquinas distinguishes between poena ‘simply’ and ‘as being satisfactory’.Footnote 68 A person is punished ‘simply’, in the ordinary sense of the term, when he involuntarily suffers the loss of some good. Examples of such punishments include when a person's wallet is stolen, or when someone falls and breaks their wrist, or when a student suffers great anxiety prior to an examination. Yet poena may be used in a qualified sense as well. Unlike punishment simply, ‘Satisfactory punishment is, in a way, voluntary’. Poena is endured in a satisfactory manner when a ‘man suffers the loss of a lesser good, that he may profit in a greater good’. For example,
when he suffers the loss of money for the sake of bodily health, or loss of both of these, for the sake of his soul's health and the glory of God. In such cases the loss is an evil to man, not simply but relatively; wherefore it does not answer to the name of punishment simply, but of medicinal punishment, because a medical man prescribes bitter potions to his patients, that he may restore them to health.Footnote 69
In Aquinas’ vocabulary, the loss of money which occurs as a result of paying the doctor for medical treatment could be called a poena. When freely handed over, this financial payment is a satisfactory poena. Such a loss involves real pain, but it is pain endured in order to avoid greater pain and acquire a good which otherwise could not be attained. This means that satisfactory punishment is primarily about gain, not loss. As Eileen Sweeney comments, ‘the concept is something of an oxymoron’.Footnote 70
Aquinas’ analysis of the voluntary nature of satisfaction provides further insight into the medicinal function of poena. He comments,
when punishment is satisfactory, it loses somewhat of the nature of punishment: for the nature of punishment is to be against the will; and although satisfactory punishment, absolutely speaking, is against the will, nevertheless in this particular case and for this particular purpose, it is voluntary. Consequently it is voluntary simply, but involuntary in a certain respect, as we have explained (q. 6, a. 6) when speaking of the voluntary and the involuntary.Footnote 71
Poena is by nature against the will. Satisfactory poena is against the will ‘in a certain respect’, but, such poena is voluntary ‘simply’, when it is freely chosen in a given set of circumstances. Aquinas refers to question six, article six of the prima-secundae in order to provide an example of such voluntarily chosen poena. There, he explains, ‘the throwing of the cargo into the sea becomes voluntary during the storm, through fear of the danger: wherefore it is clear that it is voluntary simply’.Footnote 72 Apart from these particular circumstances, the loss of cargo would be ‘repugnant to the will’ and involuntary, in an absolute sense.Footnote 73 Yet, the sailor will rejoice at the loss of cargo if this loss enables him to save his ship, his life, and the lives of all those on board. So too, satisfaction involves a particular set of circumstances in which a good generally willed is voluntarily surrendered in order to prevent further loss and acquire a greater good. Hence, again, we can see that while satisfaction involves an element of loss and so can be called a poena, its final cause is the acquisition of the good.
Before proceeding to consider how Christ's Passion functions as a satisfactory, medicinal punishment, we must first grasp Aquinas’ distinction between the formal and material elements of satisfaction. He explains,
The penalties one suffers for another's sin are the matter, as it were, of the satisfaction for that sin; but the principle is the habit of soul, whereby one is inclined to wish to satisfy for another, and from which the satisfaction has its efficacy, for satisfaction would not be efficacious unless it proceeded from charity.Footnote 74
Here, bodily defects are identified as the punishment which constitute the ‘matter’ of Christ's satisfaction. The Son assumed these defects so that ‘the matter of satisfaction should not be wanting’.Footnote 75 Elsewhere, Aquinas asserts that Christ's internal pain of sorrow was ‘employed as a useful means of satisfying for sins’.Footnote 76 He remarks, ‘to satisfy for the sins of all men, Christ accepted sadness, the greatest in absolute quantity, yet not exceeding the rule of reason’.Footnote 77 The importance of these statements for this stage of our inquiry lies in their clear distinction between the ‘matter’ and the ‘principle’ (or, form) of satisfaction. Joel Matthew Wallace states that the relationship between the form and matter of a human act ‘is able to be understood in terms of a relationship between an interior and exterior act’.Footnote 78 Christ's work of satisfaction is an exterior act of enduring poena (whether of soul, body, or possessions) that proceeds from an internal act of charity. Christ's endurance of suffering could be offered to God as a pleasing gift of satisfaction only because of the charity with which it was borne. As Wallace explains, the charity of Christ is the ‘efficient cause’ of his decision to endure suffering, and this means that his acceptance of poena was ordered ‘toward God and toward us’.Footnote 79 That is, Christ's charity ordered his suffering to his own eternal union with God as well as toward our liberation from sin. Merely the suffering of Christ was not pleasing to God. Rather, charity and its exterior acts are pleasing to the Father.
Even with this distinction in place, the role of Christ's suffering in his work of satisfaction is not entirely evident. As William Loewe puts it, we must ‘ask about the link between these two elements (form [charity] and matter [poena]). Why do Christ's love and obedience find expression precisely in his passion and death?’Footnote 80 That is, how was Christ's internal, corporal and external suffering ordered towards the real destruction of human sinfulness, and thus real satisfaction for our sins? Put differently, how was Christ's Passion a medicinal punishment on behalf of humanity? In order to answer this question, we need to read Aquinas’ account of the Passion in light of his fundamental principles regarding human acts.
IV. The Relation Between Christ's Charity and Suffering
Aquinas’ account of the natural teleology of human activity can help us to discern the nature of the link between the formal and material elements of Christ's Passion. As Nicholas Austin points out, Aquinas embraces the Aristotelian principle that ‘Nature acts for an end’. This means that the nature of a creature (its ‘substantial form’) determines the end (telos) for which it exists, and the end specifies the type of activity which that creature can and should perform.Footnote 81 Further, ‘Natural telic activity for Aquinas arises from an internal source (principio intrinseco), which itself is derived from an external source (principio extrinseco)’, namely, ‘God's intelligence and power’.Footnote 82 Consequently, (1) A human act is good only insofar as it is properly ordered towards the goods for which the human nature exists, and it is evil, at the formal or material level, when it fails in relation to the good ends of human nature; (2) the distinction between good and evil is not the arbitrary result of a voluntaristic god's decision. Rather, God gave human beings a natural law which is intrinsic to them, not extrinsic and oppressive. Further, as Austin notes, (3) God himself is the ‘exemplar cause’ of this human nature and its ends, such that natural telic human activity is a participation in the very existence and goodness of God.Footnote 83
This foundation enables us to make an initial point regarding the link between Christ's charity and suffering, namely, that Christ's charity could only be expressed materially through acts which were in accordance with the ends of his human nature. No human, Jesus included, can perform an exterior act that is objectively immoral and attempt to offer that act as a pleasing gift to the Father in satisfaction for sins. For example, if Jesus’ suffering was a result of objectively immoral behavior such as self-harm, alcohol or drug abuse, it would have been suffering divorced from charity. We see such suffering exemplified in Judas’ decision to hang himself. Suicide is never a material expression of charity, for the object of the act as such is opposed to the natural law. Such suffering would be displeasing to God, and so cannot be voluntarily chosen and offered to God in satisfaction for sins.
The relationship between the Son's dual missions also serves to clarify the order between his charity and his suffering. Dominic Legge comments, ‘all of Christ's activity in his earthly life—the whole of his visible mission—is ordered to, and reaches its accomplishment in, the invisible missions of the Son and Holy Spirit, and the Father's indwelling presence that accompanies them’.Footnote 84 The ‘invisible missions’ of the Son and Holy Spirit refers to their dynamic indwelling in the human soul through sanctifying grace, the theological virtues and the gifts of the Spirit.Footnote 85 This presence of the Son and Spirit to the soul brings the human into ‘a union of love with God’ which, as Eleonore Stump states, ‘is the greatest of goods for a human being and the best of personal relationships’. This is especially so when that union becomes permanent in eternal life.Footnote 86 This means that Christ's decision to endure poena of various kinds is salvific insofar as it is ordered towards the chief end of the divine economy: the unification of God and the sinner in a relationship of love, constituted in grace and enduring onto eternal life.
Before considering how Christ's suffering could be ordered toward the end of the invisible missions of the Son and Holy Spirit, we first need to clarify the various ways in which a human act can be ordered towards an end. Regarding human acts, Steven Long explains, ‘Either the object [of the act] is per se ordered toward the end sought by the agent, or it is not’.Footnote 87 In a per se order between object and end, ‘the achievement of X by its very nature requires the performance of Y, and in those cases where, although there is perhaps more than one way to achieve X, nonetheless Y of itself and essentially tends toward X.’Footnote 88 Quenching one's thirst requires drinking water, and the very act of drinking water directly achieves the end of satisfying thirst. The opposite of a per se order between object and end is a ‘per accidens’ order. For example, there is ‘nothing about stealing that of itself tends towards fornication’,Footnote 89 and ‘we know that beastiality is not per se ordered toward improved proficiency in calculus’.Footnote 90 A per accidens order is inorganic; doing Y is naturally irrelevant to the acquisition of X, such that any relation between the two is imposed from without. Our question, then, is whether or not there is a per se or merely per accidens order between Christ's charitable acceptance of the Passion and our access to life in the Holy Spirit.
We will focus upon two particular ways in which Christ's voluntary, loving endurance of suffering was per se ordered towards the real internal sanctification of sinners. First, the Son assumed a human nature capable of suffering so as to empower humanity to bear its defects with charity. Christ could have assumed a human nature that was preserved from passibility.Footnote 91 Instead, ‘Christ healed the passibility and corruptibility of our body by assuming it’.Footnote 92 Aquinas explains that Christ assumed our defects ‘in order to show us an example of patience by valiantly bearing up against human passibility and defects’.Footnote 93 Christ's virtue amidst suffering revealed his ‘spiritual strength, wherewith he vanquished the devil and healed human weakness’.Footnote 94 Christ ‘sustained an external assault on the part of the world and the devil, and won the crown of victory by overcoming them’.Footnote 95 As a result, the person who is united to Christ by faith and charity ‘can safeguard himself against the enemy's assaults, so as not to be dragged down into the destruction of everlasting death’.Footnote 96 For, ‘after Christ's Passion, men can defend themselves from this [the attacks of the devil] by its [the Passion's] power’.Footnote 97 Perhaps most importantly, Christ assumed the defects of sin in order to enact the perfect example of the virtue of penance. Explaining why Christ assumed these defects, but not personal guilt, Aquinas says, ‘A penitent can give a praiseworthy example, not by having sinned, but by freely bearing the punishment of sin. And hence Christ set the highest example to penitents, since he willingly bore the punishment, not of his own sin, but of the sins of others’.Footnote 98 By living a life of perfect charity amidst the experience of bodily and spiritual poena, Christ radically transformed the human capacity for virtue and enacted a life-giving example to all those who live in a fallen world.
Second, Christ's supremely just life upon earth lead to the suffering of his Passion. Aquinas claims that the spiritual value of Christ's Passion lies in the fact that he suffered ‘for justice's sake’.Footnote 99 He specifies this comment by quoting Matthew 5:10: ‘Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice's sake’.Footnote 100 Loewe explains, ‘Thomas, thus, casts Christ's passion as a martyrdom: Christ incurs death because he persevered in truth and justice even in the face of the murderous opposition his ministry evokes’.Footnote 101 Christ not only bore the defects that belong to all human beings as a result of their relation to Adam. In addition, he bore the additional defects that accompany a life of perfect virtue in a fallen world. Christ testified to the truth of his divinity, proclaimed the kingdom of God, and instructed his followers regarding the way to eternal life. As a result, he was condemned by those who rejected his message. Persevering in justice, Christ held fast to the truth and never recanted his teaching. Consequently, he was killed, but this death served as a proof of the validity of his teaching. Aquinas explains that ‘the divine power of Christ’ was revealed ‘in the force of his righteousness shown in his sinless manner of life’.Footnote 102 Similarly, Christ unveiled ‘his Godhead to all, by preaching and working miracles, and by leading among men a blameless and righteous life’.Footnote 103 The righteousness of Christ, maintained through persecution and execution, disclosed his divinity for all to see.
We can now see how the material poena of Christ's Passion could be chosen out of charity and per se ordered towards the destruction of human sin. Jesus’ suffering was not foolish and arbitrary, nor was it endured to calm the rage of a violent god. Rather, Christ's public death as a martyr on the cross naturally provided the goods of witness to divine truth and perfect moral example. In the very act of suffering on the cross, Jesus witnesses to the truth, so much so that the centurion guarding him is moved to publicly confess Jesus’ divine sonship. By personally choosing, constantly, to fulfill every demand of the natural and divine law even as he hung from the cross, Jesus’ obedience in itself perfected the human capacity for virtue and provided its greatest possible display. Christ's Passion was thus truly a medicinal poena undertaken on behalf of humanity. Christ endured the poena of the Passion in order to bear witness to the truth that saves, and in doing so to enact the greatest example of human righteousness. Through the Passion Christ experienced tremendous loss, but this loss was endured for the sake of a great gain: the proclamation of saving truth and the perfection of the human capacity to live justly towards God and neighbor. Christ's suffering enables us to receive his revelation in faith and so to participate in his perfect obedience. In this way, his Passion enables us to make satisfaction for our sins.
V. Christian Participation in the Satisfactory Poena of Christ
We have seen why Christ's satisfactory work included poena, and now we can examine why every act of Christian satisfaction must also involve poena. The nature of satisfaction as a medicinal poena becomes evident if we analyze the act in terms of its two primary stages: (1) cease sinning and begin to obey God again, (2) repair the damages of your past sins.
Stage one in the process of satisfaction is marked by a return to obedience, and obedience to God in a fallen world will always be painful. According to Aquinas, says Daria Spezzano, ‘Even after justification, [the justified person] is still afflicted with the remnants of sin, inordinately directed to temporal things’.Footnote 104 This disordered desire for temporal things makes obedience to God's commandments a painful effort, especially at the outset of the moral life. Even with growth in virtue, the sensitive appetites of sinners will never be completely healed from the traces of concupiscence on this side of eternity.Footnote 105 As Joseph Wawrykow explains, ‘The healing brought by habitual grace is not complete in this life; full healing and full restoration awaits the next life, when the person is in the immediate presence of God’.Footnote 106 Consequently, selfish impulses will never completely disappear, and the pain of resisting such impulses in order to obey God's commands will always involve the pain of self-sacrifice. This is why Aquinas affirms, ‘“by obedience we slay our own will.”’Footnote 107 Obedience is a battle against a fierce enemy, the fallen will. Our will is our most cherished possession, and handing it over to God is an excellent yet painful sacrifice:
Among the moral virtues, the greater the thing which a man contemns that he may adhere to God, the greater the virtue. Now there are three kinds of human goods that man may contemn for God's sake. The lowest of these are external goods, the goods of the body take the middle place, and the highest are the goods of the soul; and among these the chief, in a way, is the will, insofar as, by his will, man makes use of all other goods. Therefore, properly speaking, the virtue of obedience, whereby we contemn our own will for God's sake, is more praiseworthy than the other moral virtues, which contemn other goods for the sake of God.Footnote 108
Commenting on this passage, Guy Mansini remarks that obedience ‘is better than sacrifice because it renders to God what is most precious, our will’.Footnote 109 The prideful, self-serving will is what a sinner holds most dear, and by obedience they surrender that possession to God. This sacrifice of obedience must be offered at every moment of everyday to God. Such obedience is the first and fundamental step in the process of satisfaction. In order to repair the damages of their sins, the repentant sinner must first cease sinning. That is, they must exercise obedience.
Stage two in the process of satisfaction is marked by painful penances which seek to repair the damaging effects of sin. Aquinas’ comments,
the very fact that human nature needs a treatment of penal medicines, is due to the corruption of nature which is itself the punishment (poena) of original sin. For there was no need, in the state of innocence, for penal exercises in order to make progress in virtue; so that whatever is penal in the exercise of virtue, is reduced to original sin as its cause.Footnote 110
Sin darkens the intellect of the sinner and distorts the inclinations of their rational and sensitive appetite. While complete healing from these damages will only be received in heaven, the repentant sinner can begin to cooperate with God's healing grace now. Grace illuminates the sinner's mind and turns their will towards its proper object, God. Then, Spezzano says, ‘freely accepted temporal suffering’ is needed so as ‘to counteract the inordinate movement to temporal things’.Footnote 111 Such freely accepted temporal suffering is exemplified in the virtue of penance.
Penance is a medicinal poena ordered towards the reparation of the sinner's disordered appetites. Aquinas alludes to the painful character of penance when he says, ‘Penance is a kind of sacrifice, according to Ps. 50:19: “A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit.”Footnote 112 The form of penance is charity, and the matter or ‘fruit’ is ‘contrition of the heart, confession in words, and satisfaction in deeds’.Footnote 113 Contrition and confession involve the poena of sorrow. Romanus Cessario points out that, for Aquinas, the ‘deeds’ element of penance consists principally in prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. All of these ‘deeds’ of penance involve real poena: through almsgiving we lose our material possessions; fasting involves bodily suffering; in prayer, the penitent is humbled before God and suffers the loss of pride and self-absorption.Footnote 114 Yet, the purpose of penance is medicinal. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving, says Cessario, are ordered towards ‘cutting out the root causes of sin …concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life’.Footnote 115
Penance is also ordered towards the reparation of the damages caused to the sinner's neighbors. Sin does not just harm the sinner, it also directly harms the immediate victim of the sin and indirectly harms the sinner's entire community. Consequently, as Eileen Sweeny reminds us, satisfaction of necessity ‘restores justice to the one injured and to the community scandalized by the evil done. Hence, the same act repairs both the internal order of powers and ends and relationships in the community’.Footnote 116 Depending upon the nature of their sin, a sinner can afflict their neighbor with internal, corporal and/or external poena. This loss must be restored by prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Such penances will aid the victims in their suffering while also repairing the disordered will of the sinner.
Through the satisfactory poenae of obedience and penance, Christians materially participate in the satisfactory suffering of Christ. According to Aquinas, ‘Christ's satisfaction works its effect in us inasmuch as we are incorporated with him, as the members with their head. Now the members must be conformed to their head’.Footnote 117 For, ‘The head and members are as one mystic person’.Footnote 118 This configuration to Christ regards both interior and exterior acts. Internal incorporation with Christ is enacted through the theological virtue of charity, while externally the disciple is ‘likened unto Christ's suffering by some form of punishment (poenalitatis) or suffering (passionis) which they endure in their own person’.Footnote 119 This suffering is not arbitrary. Rather, as we have seen, Christian satisfactory poena consists in acts of obedience and penance. By the charitable exercise of obedience, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, the members of the mystical body materially participate in the cross of Christ, their head. Through these exterior acts, proceeding from the interior disposition of charity, Christians share in the medicinal poena which Christ suffered on the cross in order to satisfy for the damages caused by human sin. The Passion of Christ, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange explains,
[is] reproduced in different degrees in souls for their own purification and for their cooperation in their neighbor's salvation with and by our Lord and through the means that He Himself used. So, in a sense, Christ is in agony until the end of the world in His mystical body, until it is fully purified and glorified, until the word of the Master, ‘I have overcome the world’, is perfectly realized by the final victory over sin, Satan, and death.Footnote 120
By material acts of obedience and penance informed by theological charity, the members of the mystical body share in the salvific suffering of their head. In this way, Christians participate in Christ's personal conquest over the powers of evil and establishment of God's reign in the world.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to explicate Aquinas’ teaching regarding the nature of satisfaction, punishment, and the relation between them as it exists in the saving Passion of Christ. For Aquinas, the ‘punishment’ which Christ endured on the cross was not inflicted upon him by an angry, vengeful god, nor was this pain arbitrarily connected to human salvation. Rather, Christ chose, out of love, to endure the various poenae of the Passion precisely because doing so was a fitting way for him to make satisfaction for the sins of the human race. Christ died as a martyr; his suffering was a direct result of his refusal to recant the truth of his teaching or violate the moral laws of his divine Father. Consequently, Jesus’ suffering was per se ordered towards the revelation of divine truth and the perfection of the human capacity for loving obedience to God. Christ's perfect self-gift to the Father even amidst the agony of the Passion conquered all the powers of evil and was infinitely more pleasing to God than sin is displeasing. Christ's very being and activity is thus the exemplar cause of all satisfaction for sin. Because of his heroic witness unto death, Christ draws sinners to faith in himself and moves them to become spiritually incorporated into his mystical body. Then, justified and sanctified by charity, the members of Christ's body are able to participate in his continual, self-giving love to the Father. They do so through acts of obedience, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These acts are rightly called poenae because they include an unavoidable element of loss. Yet, they are even more rightly called medicinal or satisfactory poenae, for their final cause is not loss, but rather gain: these acts are per se ordered towards the honor of God and the reparation of the damages caused by sin. God does not delight in the suffering which obedience entails; he delights in the goodness of the internal and external act which the obedient person carries out. So too, God is not pleased by the pain of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving; God is pleased by the healing effects which these penitential acts have on their agent and those for whom they are undertaken. Through the ongoing execution of charitable obedience and penance, the members of the mystical body gradually become conformed to their perfect head, Christ, and cooperate with him in bringing about the salvation of the world. In this way, they become a pleasing sacrifice to the Father.
