christian-thought

To illustrate the nature of this theandric reciprocity, Thomas invokes, as an example, the physical touch of Jesus__ hand: __e wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed the leper with a touch._ The touch of a human being is not in itself miraculous, and even in Jesus this human action is not humanly healing. The miraculous fact of the healing power of this human touch, rather, as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, __roceeds from God as the principal cause and from Christ__ human nature as the instrumental cause._ Jesus works divine things humanly. More ultimately, Jesus wills the divine will of salvation humanly. And so he wills theandrically in the sense that what he wills has an __nfinite value_ that __erives from the divine suppositum that is the agent which operates_. The deifying effects of the Incarnation are thus contingent on the theandric fact of the interpenetrating unity of divine-human operations.

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.