How Could the God-Man Sorrow?

That Christ, who is both divine and human, could sorrow, might seem counterintuitive to a doctrinally sensitive believer:

And taking with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, He began to be sorrowful and troubled.  Then he said to them, "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death..." (Mt 26:37-38).

"Now is My soul troubled.  And what shall I say?  'Father, save Me from this hour'?  No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.  Father, glorify your name" (Jn 12:27-28b). 

We will briefly explain three approaches to the question of sorrow in Christ, and conclude with a reiteration of an often-overlooked aspect of the Chalcedonian definition.

St Augustine 

Augustine, the "Doctor of Grace," refers to Christ's sorrow numerous times in his Narrations on the Psalms, in which he maintains a fairly consistent interpretation of what it means for Christ to experience sorrow.  In a nutshell, in the anguished voice of Christ can be heard the suffering of His future martyrs.  This theme is repeated in his Tractates on the Gospel of John where he says, for example--

And now, again, it is my Lord Himself, who by such words has suddenly transported me from the weakness that was mine to the strength that was His, that I hear saying, "Now is my soul troubled." What does it mean?  How biddest Thou my soul follow You if I behold Your own troubled?  How shall I endure what is felt to be heavy by strength so great?  What is the kind of foundation I can seek if the Rock is giving way?  But methinks I hear in my own thoughts the Lord giving me an answer, saying,  You shall follow me the better, because it is to aid your power of endurance that I thus interpose. You have heard, as addressed to yourself, the voice of my fortitude; hear in me the voice of your infirmity:  I supply strength for your running, and I check not your hastening, but I transfer to myself your causes for trembling, and I pave the way for your marching along (52.2).

The underlying principle can be found in the revised Breviary in the Office of Matins for the First Sunday of Lent.  Commenting on the psalm, "Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer," Augustine writes:

Who is speaking?  It seems to be one individual but let us see if this is really the case.  "From the ends of the earth I called to you, when my heart was faint."  This shows that it is not one individual, except in the special sense that it is one because Christ is one and we are all members of His body.  What individual man calls out from the ends of the earth?  The only one who calls from the ends of the earth is that heritage about which it was said to God the Son:  "Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession."

It follows that it is this, Christ's possession and a heritage and body and one Church, this unity which we are, which cries from the ends of the earth (On Ps 60:2-3).

This fits within Augustine's larger theme of an ecclesial understanding of Christ's humanity, in which not only Christ as an individual speaks, but rather Christ as Head speaks on behalf of the Church.  In the tradition of a 'mystical ecclesiology' prevalent in the Church of northern Africa (think, too, of St Cyprian of Carthage), Augustine has his sights on the totus Christus, the 'whole' or 'total' Christ, of the Church together with her Founder.

St Thomas Aquinas

In his Commentary on Matthew, St Thomas offers a close, careful reading of Matthew 26:38, calling our attention to the fact that Christ did not say "I am sorrowful" but, rather, "My soul is sorrowful."  The Angelic Doctor is foremost among the theologians whose work pays special attention to Christ's soul, and locates His sorrow in the sensitive part of the soul.  In fact, he follows St Jerome who calls our attention to yet another detail, namely when the Evangelist writes that "He began to be sorrowful..."  Thus, Jerome says, Christ experienced not passion as an emotion that rebels against reason, but rather propassion.  Being perfectly sinless, the powers of Christ's soul was completely subject to His reason and His reason, in turn, entirely subject to God (stay tuned for my dissertation to see what that means!).

But, being divine, Christ knew that He would defeat death.  Why, then, did He sorrow?  Here, St Thomas takes his cue from St John Damascene and says--

But why did He sorrow?  ...Damascene says that He sorrowed for Himself.  And why?  Because sorrow is present by the fact that we lack what we naturally love.  The soul naturally desires to be united to the body, and this desire was in Christ’s soul, for He ate, and drank, and hungered. Therefore the separation was contrary to natural desire: therefore to be separated was sorrowful for it (C.26, L.5. #2225).

Death--the separation of the soul from the body--is an unnatural state insofar as human nature is concerned; confronted with the inevitability of the body-soul tear that the Crucifixion would cause, Christ's soul, during His agony at Gethsemane thus naturally sorrowed at the prospect of the unnatural state it would experience the next day.

Similar themes run through St Thomas' Commentary on John, but with an interesting twist.  Not only did Christ's sorrow demonstrate the fact of His human nature, it also modelled for Christians exemplary suffering.  With regards to John 12:27, the Magister in Sacra Pagina identifies four steps in the prayer of Christ:  "First, he poses a question, as one does when deliberating about what is to be done," hence His words when He said "And what shall I say?"  "[S]econd, he makes a request which arises from a certain inclination," as shown by His words "Father, save Me?" as a rhetorical question.  In reply, Christ declared "For this purpose I have come...":  "[T]hird, he rejects this inclination for a particular reason."  "[F]ourth, he makes another request that arises from a different inclination" in his newly-composed prayer, "Father, glorify Thy Name!" (C.12, L.5, #1655; cf ##1656-1660).

In so doing, Christ not only demonstrates His humanity--since suffering and the other emotions take place in the 'sensitive part' of the soul which, in turn, was subordinated to the 'rational part' of that same soul.  This is why Christ did not say "I am sorrowful" because the Subject of Christ Himself, His "I," is inseparable from His divine nature.  Had Christ said "I am sorrowful," He would then have indicated that the Godhead is capable of suffering.

If Augustine's take on Christ's sorrow was "ecclesial," Aquinas' concerns were primarily anthropological.

St Thomas More

On the topic of Christian death--and here Christ is the Exemplar--the martyr for the Church's liberty from secular tyranny in his The Sadness of Christ highlights a curious paradox:  Why, if the martyrs were courageous in facing their impending martyrdom, did Christ show Himself to be fearful?

Essentially, Sir Thomas, in the tradition of the Renaissance humanists, took a "rhetorical reading" of the Passion Narratives (in contrast to Aquinas' grammatical reading) and saw Christ's sorrow as, more precisely, demonstrative of His desire to feel fear as the martyrs did; the paradox is then folded inside out, as it were, as it was Christ's very example which gave the martyrs their wherewithal to die for Him.  It was, in the final analysis, a "fighting technique" for the martyrs by looking at what Christ demonstrated for their sake.

This is not to say that the sometime Chancellor of England denied Sts Augustine's and Thomas' interpretations, but rather offers still another approach to the question of why the invincible Christ volunteered to sorrow.  Thus, in contrast to the former two's "ecclesial" and "anthropological" concerns, St Thomas More's was exhortative.

It should be added that composing The Sadess of Christ was not only More's way of mustering his courage to face the executioner's block, it was also a critique of the English episcopate's pastoral cowardice in the face of Henry VIII's usurpation of the Church's authority (as one and only one bishop in all of England stood his ground, St John Fisher).

Conclusion

The dogmatic horizon against which we must gaze upon the sorrow of Christ is that of Chalcedon's insistence on the demarcation between Christ's human and divine natures.  We are used to speaking of Christ's divinity (Council of Nicaea), of Christ's unity as one Person (Council of Ephesus), but too often we forget that the Incarnate Word must remain, in the words of the Council,

...acknowledged in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation.  The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one Person and one hypostasis... (DH 302).

In other words, Christ sorrowed because He was human; Christ divinity did not, because the two natures were never 'cross-wired.'  And, let us never forget, His humanity meant God's solidarity with ours.

That being said, my would-be Doktorvater, the Reverend Professor Emmanuel Durand OP--who was called away by the Master of the Order to Rome at the start of my studies--observes in his recent book Les émotions de Dieu (Paris:  Les Éditions du Cerf, 2019):

Quelle est la portée salvifique de la tristesse de Jésus? Il convient ici de tenir ensemble exemplarité et réalité. La tristesse du Christ est la sienne et la nôtre. Il a pris sur lui et "transfigure" en lui la tristesse des membres de son corps, répétait volontiers Augustin dans ses discours durs le Psaumes. Comme le Christ a pris notre chair, avec ses limites et ses infirmités (le sommeil, la faim, la mort...) il a assumé nos passions, y compris la tristesse la plus accablante. La même mesure de réalisme s'applique à sa chair, qui est aussi vraie que la nôtre, et a sa tristesse, qui assume pleinement les nôtres. Afflige par la trahison, la défection et l'abandon de ses disciples, il est affligé par nos abandons, nos défections, nos trahisons, nos complicités. Saisi d'effroi devant une mort d'extrême violence et desolation, il assume nos propres tourments devant la mort, l'extrême de la séparation et du rejet. Une différence doit toutefois être relevee: alors même que les circonstances et les acteurs humains imposent certaines contraintes, la manière dont Jésus vit son agonie et sa passion fait prévaloir sa volonté aimante et salvifique. De la sorte, sa tristesse d'agonie, sainte et sans aucune complaisance, est pour nous-membres de son corps-salut offert et victoire potentielle sure toute tristesse humaine (266-267).

It appears, therefore, that St Thomas More went "full circle" and returned to St Augustine, only to give it a new application:  We hear, in the voice of Christ's cries, our own.