Contemplation and imitation of the physical suffering of Christ have long been considered an indication of rising lay devotion in the Christian west. Historians such as Caroline Walker Bynum,Footnote ¹ Giles Constable,Footnote ² David NirenburgFootnote ³ and Miri RubinFootnote ⁴ have suggested that, beginning in the eleventh century, images of the suffering Christ were used to promote meditation on the salvific meaning of Christ's passion. In his sermons and treatises, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux described how contemplation of Christ's pain allowed Christians to draw closer to God. Stories of saints who suffered as Christ had, such as Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century and Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth, demonstrated this new mode of affective piety. Meditatio and imitatio Christi rely on modes of sensation rather than philosophical discourse, and for this reason they are most often regarded as a piety more common to the laity or mystics than to clerics or schoolmen.Footnote ⁵ Miri Rubin argues that mystics such as Julian of Norwich tended to use pre-scholastics like Anselm of Bec, Hugh of St Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux to find models of contemplation.Footnote ⁶ Amy Hollywood and Caroline Walker Bynum, too, understand that the inspiration of affective piety is found in the writings of non-scholastics.Footnote ⁷ Yet, at the very time that the lay pious were turning towards using images of the crucified Christ and personal experiences of suffering to focus their spiritual contemplation, scholastics too were returning to an exploration of Christ's humanity, questioning what it meant for Jesus to be both fully divine and fully human. As this article will demonstrate, the scholastic return to such questions, after an hiatus of nearly eight hundred years, was intimately linked with the late medieval laity's explorations of affective and sometimes heretical piety.

Of course, initial interest in how Christ experienced his humanity began long before the late Middle Ages. Indeed, such questions were addressed in the Gospels themselves. In the synoptic Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Christ feels hunger during his forty days and nights in the wilderness.Footnote ⁸ This contrasts with the report in Mark which suggests that, during his time in the wilderness, angels ministered to Christ's needs.Footnote ⁹ It is, however, in the Gospel of John that the question of how Christ experienced his humanity is most eloquently raised. ‘In the beginning’, says John, ‘was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’Footnote ¹⁰ Some verses later John explains how Christ, the Word, was made flesh and dwelled among men.Footnote ¹¹ John's Christ was Flesh and Word, of this world and beyond it. He weptFootnote ¹² and thirstedFootnote ¹³ but was the eternal creator,Footnote ¹⁴ one with God the Father.Footnote ¹⁵ Other works of the canonical New Testament define Christ's nature in different ways, variously referring to him as the ‘first-born of all creation’,Footnote ¹⁶ ‘made [facere] by God’Footnote ¹⁷ and ‘all powerful’.Footnote ¹⁸

The accounts of Christ's nature in the Gospels sparked many debates in the ancient Christian Church.Footnote ¹⁹ Early Christian groups debated whether Christ was man or God or both, and, if he was both, how he embodied the characteristics of humanity and divinity. Some early Christians, approaching the problem from a traditionally monotheistic Jewish perspective, argued that Christ could not be God. Instead, Christ was regarded as a prophet, a man especially elected for God's work.Footnote ²⁰ In such a Christology, the Holy Spirit entered Jesus at his baptism (or alternatively at the time of his resurrection) so that he could do God's work on earth.Footnote ²¹ Others believed the world so damaged and impure that God could not have taken on human form. According to this Christology, Jesus only appeared to take on human form and only appeared to suffer; a belief now called docetism. Although there are many different understandings of what docetism was in the second century,Footnote ²² for the purposes of this paper it will be defined as the early unorthodox Christian belief that Christ did not fully inhabit a human body and so did not suffer during his death by crucifixion.Footnote ²³ Early docetists of this sort often pointed to the non-canonical Gospel of PeterFootnote ²⁴ as validation of their beliefs. In this apocryphal text, Christ endured his crucifixion as if he felt no pain.Footnote ²⁵ Even books eventually deemed canonical were ambiguous and could be used to promote the idea that Christ only appeared to be human. For example, in 2 Timothy, Christ's coming is referred to as an appearance, a verbal ambiguity that was used to support the docetic view.Footnote ²⁶ Modern scholars have little idea how widespread docetic ideas were in the first centuries after Christ's death, although recent archaeological finds suggest that the docetic Gospel of Peter was at least as popular, if not more so, than the canonical Gospel of Mark.Footnote ²⁷ On the other hand, John Kelly asserts that ‘the all but universal Christian conviction in the preceding centuries was that Jesus Christ was divine as well as human’.Footnote ²⁸ This view is challenged, however, by the actions of early Christian theologians who spent much time and energy arguing against beliefs they deemed heretical.Footnote ²⁹ The first person known to have countered docetic views in early Christian communities was Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, martyred in the first quarter of the second century. While travelling from Antioch to Rome to meet his death in a Roman arena, Ignatius sent several letters to churches in Rome and Asia Minor. In those addressed to the TralliansFootnote ³⁰ and to the Smyrnaeans,Footnote ³¹ Ignatius refers to ‘atheists’ who deny the reality of Christ's physical and emotional suffering on the cross. In Trallians, Ignatius only briefly refers to the docetists who say ‘that Christ suffered in appearance’,Footnote ³² urging that good Christians should be deaf ‘to those who say he did not eat or drink and that he did not truly die’.Footnote ³³ It is in Smyrnaeans that Ignatius turns his full attention to describing and refuting the docetic heterodoxy. He describes how Christ was flesh and divine both before and after the resurrectionFootnote ³⁴ and argues that he suffered during his incarnation, just as all humanity suffers.Footnote ³⁵ He further suggests that those who deny Christ's humanity also deny the reality of Christ's flesh in the eucharist, a problematic conclusion for Ignatius' proto-orthodox beliefs.Footnote ³⁶ Ignatius was not alone in his desire to combat docetic conceptions: in the first centuries of Christianity, church Fathers and defenders of the faith such as Irenaeus,Footnote ³⁷ TertullianFootnote ³⁸ and Pope Leo iFootnote ³⁹ all commented upon the hypostatic union of Christ's humanity and divinity. Proto-orthodox Christianity supported the notion of a Jesus who was both, and equally, fully divine and fully human, who was on the one hand omnipotent, and on the other thirsted, feared and suffered like the rest of humanity.Footnote ⁴⁰

A series of ecumenical councils in the fourth and fifth centuries clarified what orthodox Christian doctrine would teach about Christ's humanity and divinity.Footnote ⁴¹ The culmination of these meetings was the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which defined orthodox teaching on the precise nature of Christ. Christ was determined to be perfect God and perfect man, but his divine and human natures coexisted without mixing.Footnote ⁴² However, as Jaroslav Pelikan asserts, the Christology of the Council of Chalcedon was only a beginning, for it failed to tackle difficult questions, such as which of Christ's natures suffered on the cross, and how such suffering was experienced.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, even as the early ecumenical councils hammered out orthodox doctrines concerning Christ's nature, there was much debate on how Christ experienced the defects of fallen humanity.

Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300–67) is often called the Athanasius of the west for his attempts to combat Arian heretical beliefs, but recent scholarship has suggested that this title, though deserved, applies only to the later part of his life, for many of Hilary's early Christological ideas clashed with what would later become Catholic orthodoxy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Central to Hilary's problematic statements was his discussion of Christ's ability to suffer physical pain. Hilary states without reservation that although Christ was passible, and able to suffer even until death, his nature did not allow him to feel pain.Footnote ⁴⁵ Here Hilary distinguishes between Christ's ability to suffer (patiri) and his inability to experience true human pain (dolor sentire). Footnote ⁴⁶ Christ was like the air or water when a knife or spear passes through it; his body received the force of the blow or wounds, but it was not pained by them.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the same way, although the Gospels record how the Lord ate, slept, drank, felt sorrow, fear and even pain, Hilary asserts that, when he did these things, Christ was not acceding to the nature of his own body, but to the customs of human bodies, for Christ was free from all human defects.Footnote ⁴⁸ How could Christ, who was fully divine and fully human, whose hands could heal mutilated ears and raise the dead, possibly have a body which was less than perfect, a body that felt pain? Hilary's answer, of course, is that Christ could not have such a fallible body.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, although Christ suffered from the torments associated with his passion, he did not feel physical pain as a result.

Writing only fifty years after Hilary,Footnote ⁵⁰ Augustine (354–430), himself once a docetic disciple of Manichaeism, stated that his predecessor was a man of no mediocre authority in the study of Scripture and statements of faith.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet Augustine also acknowledged that the position that Christ did not suffer physically in his human form was heretical.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, for Augustine, the orthodox position that Christ could and did experience physical pain during his incarnation was so central that he seems not to have felt the need to address it in his own work on the Trinity. Instead, it is in his commentaries on the Psalms that Augustine's explanation of how Christ experienced pain is to be found. For Augustine, when Jesus conformed himself to the clothing of humanity,Footnote ⁵³ he felt pain in his flesh, but also in his human soul, for the soul can be in pain even when there is no pain in the body, but the body cannot be in pain without there being a pain of the soul.Footnote ⁵⁴ Further, Augustine suggests that the pain Christ felt in his human body was far worse than anything anyone else could experience. ‘Consider that’, Augustine writes, ‘however much you suffer, it will never come near those insults and scourges [Christ] bore, that ignominious cloak or that thorny crown and least of all will it compare with the cross, which has now been abolished as a human punishment.’Footnote ⁵⁵

With the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon and the anti-docetic writings of the Fathers of the Church, debates concerning the reality of Christ's physical suffering come to an end in the west, during the fifth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ Certainly later theologians such as Anselm of Bec (c. 1033–1109),Footnote ⁵⁷ Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142)Footnote ⁵⁸ and others debated the meaning of Christ's suffering and the importance of the physical wounds he carried (the so-called doctrine of atonement), but no one questioned or even defended the reality of his physical suffering. Indeed, it was not until the advent of courses in theology at the newly-founded universities that the question of the reality of Christ's suffering was again addressed, this time in an attempt to reconcile the different opinions of patristic writers.

In the high Middle Ages scholastics who studied and taught at the University of Paris, such as Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure revisited the question of whether Christ could experience physical pain. They sided with Augustine, finding Hilary's denial of Christ's capacity to suffer intensely problematic. In his Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, completed in its definitive form between 1155 and 1157,Footnote ⁵⁹ Peter Lombard attempted to reconcile the differing opinions of church Fathers on a multitude of different theological questions. The third of his four books is dedicated entirely to questions about Christ, and he spends considerable time describing how precisely Christ experienced his human nature. He begins by outlining three different theories or opinions of Christ's incarnation and rejects all of them, for different reasons. He opposes the idea that Christ assumed the nature of man for to do so would have meant that Christ's two natures mingled indiscriminately upon Christ's incarnation, creating a new entity that was both semi-human and semi-divine. This suggests that man became God just as God became man.Footnote ⁶⁰ The subsistence theory of Christ's incarnation posits that Christ was a composite individual who was made of the three substances, the Godhead, the body and the soul. Thus, when the Son of God assumed the nature of man, he became something (aliquid), but man did not become God. The Lombard rejected the subsistence theory because it too implied that Christ's natures were mixed, though to a lesser degree than the first opinion, the assumptus theory.Footnote ⁶¹ Finally, he decries the so-called habitus-theory, the hypothesis that Christ wore his humanity like a piece of clothing, for this implied that Christ's human and divine natures were not completely united, that in Christ the body and soul could not be united as they were in man.Footnote ⁶² Though the Lombard rejected all three theories of Christ's incarnation, within a century of the completion of the Sentences, the subsistence theory would be accepted as the orthodox understanding of Christ's incarnation.Footnote ⁶³ In spite of his certainty that current theories of Christ's incarnation were problematic, the Lombard does attempt to theorise how, precisely, Christ suffered in his human and divine natures. Harking back to the arguments of Augustine, Peter described how God the Son, when he took on human form, also accepted some of the defects of human nature. Specifically, Christ took on all the defects that belonged to mankind before the fall: those that proved his humanity, those that raised the hope of mankind, and those that he needed to complete his role as the living God.Footnote ⁶⁴ Christ's human nature gained a soul and a body that were capable of suffering, of feeling hunger and thirst, and of experiencing pain and fear.Footnote ⁶⁵

When Peter turned to a discussion of how Hilary of Poitiers described Christ's experience of suffering without pain, he initially seemed at a loss to understand Hilary's position. He called it ‘obscure’ and suggested that it ‘seemed to negate the common understanding’ of Christ's experience of pain in his human nature.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Lombard then reproduced much of Hilary's argument that Christ did not have the nature to feel pain, and defended how Hilary could have held such a seemingly unorthodox position.Footnote ⁶⁷ Trying to reconcile the position of the ‘Athanasius of the west’ to orthodoxy, Peter suggests that Hilary did not intend to imply that Christ's human nature did not feel pain at all, but rather that Christ did not feel pain as the rest of mankind did.Footnote ⁶⁸ For, after all, Christ's human body could walk on water, while ours cannot.Footnote ⁶⁹

Peter's own understanding of how Christ experienced the pain of his passion ties in neatly with his reading of Hilary. Christ's human nature felt pain not as a passio, which is how humans experienced pain, but as a propassio. Footnote ⁷⁰ This meant that Christ never experienced fear, sadness and, by extension, pain so great that it disordered his emotions or drew him away from contemplation of God.Footnote ⁷¹ In this way Christ was exempt from full participation in the human condition.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, by referring to Christ's experience of pain, hunger and sadness as propassiones, the Lombard suggests that Christ's emotions, his sadness, fear and pain, were not especially severe.

Writing only fifteen years after Peter Lombard completed his Sententiae, Peter of Poitiers (fl. 1170–1215), chancellor of the cathedral school of Notre Dame and de facto head of the emerging university in Paris, also addressed the problem of Christ's experience of physical pain in his commentary on Peter Lombard, his Sententiarum libri V.Footnote ⁷³ Peter's discussion nuanced even further how Christ's human nature experienced fear, sadness and pain. Like the Lombard, although using very different language, Peter of Poitiers argues that Christ assumed only some of mankind's defects when he took on human form. For Peter of Poitiers, Christ had both the rationality and the sensuality of any human. However, unlike the rest of humanity, Christ had only a higher or superior sense of sensuality.Footnote ⁷⁴ For this reason, Christ experienced only those weaknesses which resulted from the ‘movement of defects’, by which he means the natural weaknesses of post-lapsarian man – for example the need to eat and drink – and not those which resulted from the movement of ‘unlawful defects’ such as rage, lust and pride.Footnote ⁷⁵ Like the Lombard, Peter of Poitiers argued that

Peter of Poitiers and the Lombard also agreed that although Christ took on human defects, he only ever felt defective emotions, such as fear, sadness and pain as a propassio, rather than a passio. Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus, Christ's suffering could not be compared to human modes of experiencing pain.

Following in the footsteps of Peter of Poitiers, two other early Parisian scholastics, Alexander of Hales (c. 1185–1244)Footnote ⁷⁸ and Hugh of St Cher (c. 1190–1263)Footnote ⁷⁹ also wrote their own commentaries on the Sentences. By the time that Alexander and Hugh were writing, the habitus-theory of Christ's incarnation had been defined as heretical and the subsistence theory was on its way to becoming the universally accepted theory of incarnation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Working within the subsistence theory, both Alexander and Hugh accept their predecessors' opinion that Christ experienced pain, albeit in a limited sense, as a propassio, not a passio,Footnote ⁸¹ by concluding that his body did not have the ability to experience the passio of pain.Footnote ⁸² Yet Alexander of Hales introduced a new question, one that was to become very important to later Dominican commentators such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Alexander compares the meaning of Christ's sacrifice on the cross to the deaths of the early Christian martyrs. He asks, ‘If the passion of Christ was sufficient satisfaction for sins and the punishment of sin, did the martyrs not provide satisfaction more than others?’Footnote ⁸³ That is, were the martyrs who died for the Christian faith not more deserving of redemption than ordinary Christians? Alexander concludes that although Christ's passion was sufficient for ensuring mankind's redemption, whatever anyone else suffers, it can never be sufficient, even for his own salvation.Footnote ⁸⁴ Though Alexander firmly believes that there is a purpose to the deaths of the martyrs, indeed that there is no higher honour than to die for God, none of the actions of man can be regarded as sufficient even for the remission of his own sins.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although Alexander stresses the unique significance of Christ's suffering and death in salvation history, he does not at all suggest that Christ's experience of anguish was more painful than other people's suffering. The meaning of Christ's suffering and death, rather than his experience of pain, was the unique and incomparable portion of his incarnation.

These early commentaries, particularly that of Alexander of Hales in the first half of the thirteenth century, allowed later scholastics to ponder precisely how Christ's suffering was different from other people's and how his suffering and death ensured salvation. The first commentator known to have asked such a question is the unknown author of ms Vat. lat. 691. There has been much debate about the identity of this precisely written commentary; indeed, scholars do not even agree on whether the author was Franciscan, Dominican or neither.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, most scholars do agree that it was written between 1236 and 1245 and that its author studied and taught at the University of Paris.

The page of ms Vat. lat. 691 that comments on the Lombard's discussion of Christ's experience of pain (fo. 100v), is written in a double column with few scribal errors and, like the rest of the manuscript, is very neatly presented. Noting the Lombard's discussion of Hilary, particularly the discussion of how Christ would feel the blow of the lance that cut his side, but not the pain from that blow,Footnote ⁸⁷ the unknown commentator adds in his own hand a question that arises from that discussion: ‘How far did it [the blow of the lance] disturb [Christ's] reason towards the element of pain or was [Christ's] reason not disturbed towards the element of pain of the passion.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The question clearly concerns the unknown commentator, for he spends some time trying to answer it. He asks whether ‘the punishment of Christ was the greatest or whether it was greater than other punishments of pure, that is prelapsarian, man’.Footnote ⁸⁹ He concludes that the separation of Christ's body and soul upon his natural death would have been more painful to Christ than the same experience in any other human being, including Adam should he have died before the fall.Footnote ⁹⁰ For the first time in this survey of Sentence commentaries, Christ's experience of pain is described as harsher than anything that anyone else could have experienced.

The unknown commentator then presents a counter-argument. He states that there are two kinds of life, and hence, two kinds of death – the vita naturae and the vita gratiae. Footnote ⁹¹ The second sort of death is the worse kind, for it occurs when the soul is separated from God through unresolved sin and results in eternal death. Natural death, which occurs when the soul is parted from the body, only results in secular death, so that eternal life is still possible. For this reason the unknown commentator argues that Christ's death could not have been the most painful, for he only died according to the vita naturae, which resulted in bodily rather than spiritual death.Footnote ⁹² Further, the commentator adds, Christ approached his death willingly, and this, in itself, indicates that his pain could not have been the most severe imaginable, for even as he suffered, his reason was able to rejoice, for he knew that by his own suffering, he would be able to save mankind.Footnote ⁹³

The solution finally offered by the unknown author is ambiguous. He argues that in some ways Christ's passion was the most severe pain ever experienced and in some ways it was not. Christ did not suffer most acutely because he experienced more causes of pain nor because his death provided a great benefit for mankind. Christ only suffered more severely because his passion was against both his natural and intellectual wills.Footnote ⁹⁴ Although in the preceding paragraph Christ's willingness to suffer mitigates his pain, as it often does in the Lives of the Christian martyrs, the solutio itself suggests that Christ's pain was entirely involuntary. Regardless of this contradiction, ms Vat. lat. 691 does suggest, for the first time since Augustine's commentary on the Psalms, that in some ways Christ's suffering during his passion was the most severe ever experienced. Yet, the unknown commentator recognised the paradox of Christ's experience of great suffering and his ability to feel the defects of human nature, including fear and pain, only insofar as it did not hinder his ability to reason. He tries to resolve this paradox by suggesting that in some ways Christ's pain was the most severe ever experienced, and in some ways it was not.

One of the greatest intellectuals of his age, the Dominican Albert the Great, echoes these concerns. Although Albert agrees with all of his predecessors who commented upon Christ's human defects, he also states that Christ's pain was the greatest that was ever known or would ever be known. To demonstrate this Albert compares Christ's experience of pain to the pain of the martyred saints: this seems to be the first time that such a question had been posed in a scholastic text.

Albert begins his response in the scholastic manner, naming objections to the position for which he will finally argue. Thus, he objects that Christ's pain could not have been as great as that of some of the saints because it is clear in the vitae of certain saints, such as those of Laurence and Vincent, that they endured longer, more numerous and harsher types of torments.Footnote ⁹⁵ Further, he objects, one's desire for union in Christ lessens one's terrestrial punishment at the time of death, and thus one's experience of pain. Hence, he who was of the highest charity and was unified with Christ by being him, ought not to have been punished on earth at all, and thus he ought to have experienced the least pain.Footnote ⁹⁶ Third, delight in the recompense can mitigate pain. As Christ's loss of life brought about the greatest return, namely the salvation of mankind, his pain must have been minimised.Footnote ⁹⁷ Albert further objects that the pain that the saints felt as they were dying was lessened by the hope of resurrection. Christ's own pain must have been diminished even more as he knew (rather than hoped) that he was to be returned from the dead.Footnote ⁹⁸ Finally, Albert states that although Christ experienced pain upon his death, he did not experience the greater pain that occurs because of sin, which draws men even further away from the good, or God.Footnote ⁹⁹

After presenting these objections, Albert presents the contrary positions and finally his solution, in which he concedes that Christ suffered more bitterly than any other man had or would.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ There were three reasons for this: (1) Christ's unique position as a sacrifice that allowed much of humanity's debt to be satisfied ensured that his suffering was the most severe;Footnote ¹⁰¹ (2) Christ's essential goodness and the innocent nature of his life ensured that he suffered greatly, though not, Albert is quick to point out, on account of his own sins, nor on account of his fear of an eternal death. Rather, Christ's experience of pain resulted from the torture inflicted upon him, and thus in the way his soul was freed from his natural body;Footnote ¹⁰² and (3) Christ's most noble body felt pain perfectly.Footnote ¹⁰³

It is, however, Albert's replies to his initial objections that prove the most telling. In reply to his first objection, that various saints' vitae seem to imply that some martyrs suffered more than Christ, Albert argues that although many saints suffered harsh punishments and sometimes for a longer period of time than Christ, no saint sensed pain as bitterly as Christ.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the charity of Christ's sacrifice did not diminish his feeling of pain but rather his own consideration of pain, that is, Christ did not dwell on the pain, though he certainly felt it. In saints, however, contemplation of, or perhaps the aspiration to be with Christ, can diminish both the saint's consideration of pain and his sense of pain. In this way then, the pain experienced by any saint was less bitter than the suffering of Christ.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To the third objection, that contemplation of the greatest good, the salvation of mankind, diminished Christ's pain, Albert replies that Christ's life was worth much more than the salvation of the whole of humanity. Moreover, man's redemption could not occur immediately, but would be postponed until everyone could be saved.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Further, Christ's foreknowledge of his resurrection did not diminish Christ's sense or experience of bitter pain.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Finally, Albert argues that Christ suffered more on account of his death, even though men also experienced loss as a result of their separation from God through sin. For Albert, separation from God attacks not the senses but rather one's perception of loss. It is true that there is a greater sense of loss due to a separation from God than a separation from life; none the less, such a separation from God, which comes about due to man's sin, does not affect the senses and so does not, in itself, cause sensate (physical) pain. Thus, one cannot use mankind's separation from God as an argument that Christ suffered less than other men did.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

After completing his discussion of how none of the saints suffered as much as Christ and demonstrating that no individual had ever or would ever experience the same bitterness of pain as Christ, Albert continues in a similar vein, arguing in a much shorter article that even the first man, had he been able to suffer in paradise, would not have felt pain as Christ had.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The purpose of these two articles, found, it seems, for the first time in Albert the Great's commentary on the Sentences, is to prove clearly that the physical pain that Christ experienced during his passion was incredibly severe. No other individual could ever experience the bitterness of Christ's suffering.

Like his teacher, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas also details precisely how Christ suffered more bitterly than anyone ever had or ever would. The excellence of Christ's nature, specifically his sense of touch, ensured that he had a very strong sense of pain. Moreover, the nature of his crucifixion, that he was nailed to the cross in those places where the body was most sensitive to pain, the hands and feet, ensured that his sense of anguish was most severe.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Christ's pain was also severe because it was unmitigated in the way that human suffering can be, either by detachment from the circumstances or by a love of the cause for which one suffers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Finally, Christ's willingness to suffer meant that his pain was bitter.Footnote ¹¹² However, like the unknown commentator in ms Vat. lat. 691, he recognises a logical problem within his argument. How can Christ have suffered so much if he only felt defects of human nature like pain according to reason? Unlike the previous commentators, Thomas attempts to deal with this seeming paradox by arguing that Christ's pain did not reach completely to his superior reason.Footnote ¹¹³

For Thomas, Christ certainly experienced pain according to inferior or sensual reason. This occurred because the objects of inferior reason are temporal circumstances in which something contrary to one's will may arise. Like sadness, the pain that Christ felt was against his inferior rationality, by which he naturally disapproved of death and pain. However, unlike sadness, Christ also experienced pain according to what Thomas terms ‘superior reason’. This could happen because Christ's superior rationality was divided into two parts, reason according to nature and reason according to reason itself. Although Thomas argues that Christ could not have suffered in the superior reason according to reason itself (for a greater good was coming from his death, namely the redemption of mankind), he states that Christ could and did suffer in his superior reason according to nature. Indeed, in this superior reason according to nature, Christ suffered most extremely, up to the very essence of his soul.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In this way, Thomas attempts to reconcile some of the more problematic statements of previous commentators. He explains how Christ could suffer willingly and, more important, how he could suffer and suffer bitterly according to reason.

The complex argument found in Thomas's commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, is simplified in his later work, the Summa theologiae. Composed shortly before his death in November 1273, question 46, article 6 of the third part of the Summa clarifies the Thomistic understanding of the importance of Christ's experience of pain. As in his commentary on the Sentences, Thomas's Summa argues that there was true and sensible pain in the suffering Christ, both relating to the body and to the soul. Indeed, for Thomas, Christ suffered tremendously, both physically and mentally.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He suffered from the abandonment of his friendsFootnote ¹¹⁶ and on account of the blasphemies, abuses and mocking levelled against him.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He also suffered in different parts of his body, including his head, his hands and feet, in his face and in the whole of his body.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Finally, Thomas argues that Christ suffered ‘according to every corporeal sense’. Of course, he suffered in his sense of touch when he was whipped and crucified, but he also suffered in his sense of taste for he was forced to drink bile and vinegar. His sense of smell suffered as he was crucified at Calvary where the stench of dead bodies lingered. His ears burned with the blasphemies that were flung at him and finally his sense of sight was pained by the picture of his mother and the disciple whom he loved weeping for him.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Clearly then, Thomas concludes, as had his mentor, Albert the Great, before him, that the suffering of Christ was greater than that of anyone else, including the saints.

A review of the texts examined above demonstrates a significant trend. In the theological treatises of the thirteenth century the physical pain of Christ becomes a much more central issue than in the texts of the previous century. Peter Lombard's Sententiae in IV libris and the early commentaries written by Peter of Poitiers, Alexander of Hales and Hugh of St Cher suggest that the question of how Christ felt pain was of no great interest. When the suffering of Christ is mentioned at all, it is usually within the context of other human defects assumed by Christ. Pain, like sadness and hunger, was just one of the many attributes of post-lapsarian man that Christ experienced during his time among men. Peter and his early commentators accorded no exceptional status to the pain that Christ experienced.

Beginning with the anonymous commentary of ms Vat. lat. 691, ideas about the nature of Christ's pain appear to change. In that manuscript the question of how precisely Christ suffered is raised and in the Sentence commentaries of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, that question is answered. Christ's pain was the most severe ever experienced, though it did not and could not draw him away from righteous contemplation of God. Both Albert and Thomas state this explicitly in their commentaries and endeavour to prove it by examining the quality and duration of Christ's physical pain in comparison to the suffering of the saints.

It appears that this renewed interest in Christ's humanity through his experience of physical pain was a particularly Dominican concern. The foremost Franciscan theologian contemporary with Albert and Thomas, Bonaventure di Bagnoregio, also discussed the defects that the incarnate Christ took on. Like his Dominican contemporaries, he asks whether Christ experienced true pain and whether that pain was most bitter and acute.Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet, Bonaventure does not compare Christ's pain to that of the saints as explicitly as Albert and Thomas. Unlike his Dominican counterparts, Bonaventure never poses so specific a question.Footnote ¹²¹ Moreover, while Thomas and Albert focus almost exclusively on how Christ's physical pain was greater than any other experience, Bonaventure is as interested in Christ's emotional suffering as he is in the physical.Footnote ¹²² In his soul, Bonaventure argued, Christ suffered both from the physical pain of his body and from emotional pain. He goes on to ask whether Christ experienced pain more intensely in the rational or sensual part of his soul and ends by concluding that although the pain of Christ's passion was intense, the compassion his soul felt in responding to the causes of the passion were greater.Footnote ¹²³ Indeed, Bonaventure ensures that his readers would recall the primacy of Christ's interior suffering by ending his discussion of the question with a poem that he attributes to Philip the Chancellor in the first half of the thirteenth century:Footnote ¹²⁴

None of the Dominican authors compares Christ's physical suffering to his emotional pain, nor do any conclude that his internal suffering was the greater.

Why was there a sudden interest on the part of Dominicans in defining Christ's physical pain as the most severe that could ever be experienced? In Paris, to judge by the commentaries, the question became significant relatively quickly, between 1235 and 1250. The cause perhaps lies in the complex and changing social and religious milieu that was emerging in western Europe at this time. The rising popularity of Cathar beliefs and the Church's desire to counteract these ideas through the preaching of the Dominicans, the increasing interest in Christ's humanity and an initial concern on the part of some Dominican intellectuals about new modes of affective piety all contributed to the changing discussions of Christ's physical pain in the Sentence commentaries emanating from Paris in the mid-thirteenth century.

For intellectuals like Albert and Thomas, Catharism, with its emphasis upon a dualistic cosmology in which Satan ruled the material world and God ruled the spiritual, must have harked back to the early docetic heresies of late antiquity. According to Cathar Christology, as in that of the early docetics, Christ's body only appeared to be human; it was in fact made up of a celestial essence, for to become human would have meant submitting himself to Satan.Footnote ¹²⁶ To members of the Dominican order, largely responsible for finding heretics and returning them to the Catholic fold, these beliefs must have sounded like the earlier docetic heresies of Arius and Mani. Textual and manuscript evidence from the period supports this conclusion. For example, in a sermon on the origin of Cathar beliefs, Stephen of Bourbon links the origins of the Cathar heresy with the errors of the Manicheans.Footnote ¹²⁷ In his study of this text, Jacques Berlioz notes that a marginal gloss on the sermon, found in Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, ms lat. 15970, fo. 405v, states that the term Albigensians was simply another name for Manichaeans, used in the region of Provence, just as they were called Cathars by the Germans.Footnote ¹²⁸ Thomas Aquinas, a contemporary of Stephen of Bourbon, defined the Manicheans as docetists who believed that Christ assumed not a real body but a phantom one. The Manichean Christ, like the Cathar one, was not a true man but only took on the appearance of man by seeming to eat, drink, walk and suffer.Footnote ¹²⁹ In his very thoughtful discussion of Thomas Aquinas and the Cathars, John Inglis suggests that these Manichaeans are not the heretics of the fourth century, but are those whom the Dominican order was battling even as Thomas taught and wrote.Footnote ¹³⁰ Inglis further postulates that Aquinas structured the third book of his commentary on the Sentences and the tertia pars of the Summa theologiae with the direct intention of countering Cathar ideas of the incarnation.Footnote ¹³¹ However, Aquinas did not halt his defence of Catholic ideas of the incarnation at discussions of how Christ attained knowledge, as Inglis indirectly suggests;Footnote ¹³² his very discussion of Christ's experience of hunger, sadness and especially pain, was directed towards Cathar beliefs in Christ's phantasmic body. Thomas's resounding rejection of the habitus-theory of Christ's incarnation is also linked to fighting the Cathar heresy. As Walter Principe has rightly noted, Thomas's perception of the habitus ‘error’, which argued that there was no true connection between Christ's body and soul, meant that he would never have experienced true sensation; he would have been simply a phantasm of a man, precisely what the Cathar heretics were arguing.Footnote ¹³³ Thus, building on the arguments of Albert the Great, Aquinas explained in great detail how Christ experienced severe pain in all of his five senses, proving without a doubt the reality of Christ's humanity and demonstrated the ‘erroneous’ arguments of the Cathar heretics.

Yet, Aquinas and his master Albert Magnus should not be read only in the context of the Dominican desire to refute contemporary heretical beliefs, but also as expressing and even resisting emerging trends in orthodox expressions of piety. In the thirteenth century new modes of affective devotion to God were developing that focused upon how an individual's experience of suffering could bring one closer to God through the process of imitatio Christi. In the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux had taught that one could approach God through humility and that contemplation of Christ's suffering humanity was more helpful to the laity than devotion to the divinity of the Godhead.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the first decades of the thirteenth century Francis of Assisi suffered captivity and illnesses, culminating in his experience of the stigmata, all of which allowed him a feeling of unprecedented closeness to God. Other pious people soon followed in the footsteps of these pioneers, using bodily suffering to approach and experience an affinity with God in a new way.Footnote ¹³⁵

The revived importance of the body in personal devotion and in theological treatises has been much studied. Colin Morris has argued that the increasing interest in humanity is part of the ‘rediscovery’ of the individual he sees occurring after the tenth century.Footnote ¹³⁶ Miri Rubin seems to suggest that growing interest in Christ's humanity was related to growing eucharistic piety in the later Middle Ages.Footnote ¹³⁷ Most commonly, however, scholars have linked thirteenth-century popular devotion to Christ crucified with Francis of Assisi's affective piety and desire to imitate the suffering Christ.Footnote ¹³⁸ Although Marie-Christine Sepière and, to a lesser extent, Celia Chazelle have recently argued that the emphasis in art on Christ's human suffering has roots in the Carolingian period, this ground-breaking work does not seriously challenge the common assertion that the twelfth-century renaissance, rather than the Carolingian, turned away from narrating and depicting God's divinity in favour of his humanity.Footnote ¹³⁹ In many ways thirteenth-century scholastic interest in the humanity of Christ and Christ's physical suffering can be read as a part of the larger societal trend which was renewing its interest in the powers of the human body. In the same way as representational art, mystical treatises and hagiographies in the thirteenth century, scholarly texts, too, turned to discussions of the body's role in piety and salvation. As Christ was both divine and human, commentators understood that he could not be excluded from this new debate. Like the body and soul of a medieval sinner who must atone with both, both of Christ's natures were integral to man's redemption through the crucifixion.

Thus, at first glance, mid thirteenth-century Dominican scholastic arguments that emphasise the role of Christ's body in the narrative of human salvation seem to accept new Cistercian- and Franciscan-driven ideas of the importance of the body in individual spiritual renewal. However, the commentaries of Dominican scholastics can also be read as a challenge to such new modes of affective piety. Dominican commentators, beginning with the unknown author of ms Vat. Lat. 691, all argued that Christ's suffering was particularly severe. The anonymous author of that commentary begins this trend by arguing that in some ways, though not all, Christ's suffering was the most severe ever imagined. Albert Magnus goes much further, baldly stating that Christ suffered more during his passion than pre-lapsarian man did and even more than any of the saints, though he acknowledges that in their various Lives the saints seem to suffer more. Thomas Aquinas follows in his teacher's footsteps, emphasising the wretchedness of Christ's own experience of suffering and arguing that humanity cannot ever comprehend the pain of the passion. These arguments can and should be read as a critique of the new modes of affective piety developing in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century.

It has become relatively commonplace to argue that Dominicans and Franciscans accepted the ideals of affective piety relatively contemporaneously and to see little difference between the early pastoral and liturgical elements of the two orders.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Neverthless, differences did exist. While Franciscan authors, such as Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure di Bagnoregio, presented their founder as an imitator of Christ almost immediately after his death, Dominican vitae of Francis consistently refused to describe him in such a way. Even within their own hagiography Dominican writers did not generally present Dominic, or even the martyred Peter of Verona, as an alter Christus. Footnote ¹⁴¹ While depictions of Francis performing miracles or receiving the stigmata flourished in Italy in the first century after the foundation of the Franciscan order, far fewer representations of Dominic existed.Footnote ¹⁴² Even representations of Peter Martyr, who is sometimes depicted with St Francis, tend not to suggest that the martyred saint imitated Christ in his death. Rather, frescoes and manuscript illuminations of Peter's death generally model the scene on the stoning of St Stephen.Footnote ¹⁴³ In her unpublished thesis on Dominican art in duecento Italy, Joanna Cannon describes two late thirteenth-century crucifixion frescoes that perfectly symbolise the difference between Franciscan and Dominican understandings of their relationship to the crucified Jesus. Painted at the end of the thirteenth century for the Dominican chapter house in Pistoia, the Dominican fresco presents a traditional scene of the crucifixion. The two Dominican saints, Dominic and Peter of Verona, stand to the side of the scene watching but not participating. In contrast, the Franciscan crucifixion scene painted by Cimabue found in the Church of St Francis in Assisi shows Francis at the very centre of the scene touching the cross. This demonstrates the intimate connection that Franciscans believed their founder had to the suffering Christ. In contrast, Dominican narratives and, as Joanna Cannon has shown, Dominican art both seem to suggest that Christ's suffering can be witnessed but never experienced. Such popular constructions of limited saintly suffering are connected to the emerging Christology that has been described in this article, a Christology that emphasises the primacy of Christ's physical suffering. Imitatio Christi, particularly in the Franciscan mode, threatened to blur the divisions between a saint's sacrifice, which could not bring about even his own salvation, and Christ's, which saved all of humanity. While there is little doubt that affective piety quickly became a normative way for Dominicans to express their devotion to God,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ in the first decades of the Dominican order, Dominican commentators trained at the University of Paris expressed the idea that it was impossible to imitate Christ's experience of suffering.

The probable reasons for thirteenth-century Dominican interest in emphasising the unique severity of Christ's physical pain during his crucifixion are complex and, it appears, not always complimentary. To be sure, the Dominican scholastics' interest in Christ's humanity is perhaps best seen as a part of a much wider trend towards a general reviving interest in humanity and human achievement. It can also be read as participating in the new modes of affective piety that Cistercians and Franciscans were advocating in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet, by emphasising Christ's experience of pain as more severe than any other, Dominican scholastics were also challenging Cathar doctrine, which many Dominicans perceived as a revival of the early Christian heresy of docetism. Finally, Dominican emphasis on the severity of Christ's physical suffering can also be read as resisting the popular move towards affective piety occurring in the thirteenth century, suggesting that no matter how much people suffered and even, as had Francis, imitated the suffering of Christ, they could never comprehend the severity of his experience. It was a subtle reminder that, while imitatio Christi was useful as a way to approach Christ, it was not to be construed as a means of enacting salvation through a literal imitation of Christ.