God Incarnate

Abstract Christology can be defined as the study of the person of Christ and, in particular, of the union in him of divine and human natures’. Not everyone would agree with this definition, and it cannot be said whether or not Thomas Aquinas would have agreed with it, although it might well be surmised that he would at least sympathize with it, because Christology (in the sense defined here) is his chief concern when he talks about Christ directly; it is also an area of inquiry in which he draws heavily on what he had said before he turned to the subject of Christ. Aquinas’ Christology is indebted to his teaching on God considered as Creator and Trinity. It is also bound up with what he thinks about human beings and their natural and supernatural happiness, for he conceives of Christ as the definitive means by which creatures who have come from God return to their source, and he takes him to be the point at which divinity and humanity come closest to each other. The different sections of the chapter discuss the general nature of Aquinas’ Christology, the union of divinity and humanity, and what Christ was like as Aquinas viewed him.