Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
Could Christ have freely rejected the will of the Father,
or rejected the divine Good as the proper end of his rational
intentionality? Not only could he not have done so as a matter
of actual fact; for just that reason, neither could he have pos-
sessed the capacity to do so. In truth, even the word "capacity"
is misleading here, since such a susceptibility to sin would be a
defect of the will rather than a natural power. The very thought
that Christ might have turned from God, even as an abstract
potential of his human nature, would make a nonsense of
both Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. In the case of
the former, it would contradict the claim that Christ is God
of God, the divine Logos, the eternal Son whose whole being is
the perfect expression of the Father, of one essence with Father
and Spirit, rather than some mere creature outside the single
intellect and will of God. In the latter, it would undermine the
logic of the so-called enhypostatic union: the doctrine, that is,
that there is but one person in Jesus, that he is not an amal-
gamation of two distinct centers of consciousness in extrinsic
association, and that this one person, who possesses at once a
wholly divine and a wholly human nature, is none other than
the hypostasis, the divine Person, of the eternal Son. It is, after
all, a cardinal principle of orthodox Christo logy that the in -
tegrity of Christ's humanity entails that he possesses a full and
intact human will, and that this will is in no wise diminished
or impaired by being "operated," so to speak, by a divine hy-
postasis whose will is simply God's own willing. So, if human
nature required the real capacity freely to reject God, then
Christ could not have been fully human. According to Maxi-
mus, however, Christ possesses no gnomic will at all, and this
because his will was perfectly free.
Nor, incidentally, does it make any difference here to ar-
gue ( as some, I feel sure, would want to do if pressed on this