Coakley on Norris on Incarnation

Sarah Coakley’s article from a symposium on the incarnation (published by Oxford) analyzes the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some of Norris’s historical anlaysis (she sees him importing post-liberal obsessions into his interpretations of the historical evidence, and quite nicely defends the notion that the formulators of Chalcedon thought they were making ontological claims and not merely offering “grammatical” rules for ecclesial life). But she also presents an argument from Norris that is worth further thought:

“Norris concludes that [Chalcedon] ‘appears to insist upon a synthesis or unioon of INCOMPATIBLES ?Eprecisely because it takes its physical models too seriously.’ In other words, the concretization of thought about the ‘natures’ leads, he avers, to the supposition of their ‘incompatibility.’ And whereas in the patristic debate this false disjunction resulted in an overemphasis (claims Norris) on Christ’s divinity, the modern form of this aberrant perception of Chalcedon’s intent has been the opposite: ‘a new type of Monophysitism ?Ea tendency, in the face of its own strong sense of the incompatibility of divine and human agencies, to reduce the Christ not to a God fitted out with vestiges of humanity but to a human being adorned with the vestiges of divinity.

“Both these alternatives, however, suffer from a misconception of the ‘natures’ as ‘interchangeable contraries’ ?Eas ‘differing items of the SAME order,’ competing against one another for the same space . . . . we need a ‘negative theology’ here in a particular sense, one that DENIES that the difference between God and humanity is a matter either of ‘contrariety’ or of ‘contradiction.’ It is not an issue of ‘how to fit two logical contraries together into one, as its ancient and modern interpreters have all but uniformly supposed, but how to dispense with a binary logic in figuring the relation between God and creatures.”

Coakley adds that “we may agree with Norris that to gloss the human and divine ‘natures’ as inherently two of the same kind, and/or in ‘contradiction’ with one another, is not implied by the text of the ‘Definition’ per se. However, it has to be said that the text does not rule out that interpretation either . . . .”

A couple of comments: First, Norris’s analysis suggests that there is a problem with the Chalcedonian conceptualization of Christology. In Thomist terms, the problem is that it assumes that God (or divine “nature” ?Ebut is that different from God?) is a member of a genus, the genus “nature.” This assumes a general metaphysical category of “nature,” of which there are (at least) two subsets, divine and human. But Thomas is surely right that God is not a member of a genus, and it would seem that “divine nature” should not be conceived as a member of the genus “nature.” Perhaps we can introduce analogy into the mix, which would solve the problem along the lines of saying that divine and human nature are not two “degrees” of a single thing or two species of a single genus, but rather that they are analogically related; divine nature is the original of which human nature is a copy, and despite the distance between them there is also similarity. I suppose that’s what the Chalcedonian formula has in mind, but at least it needs to be emphasized that we are not talking about two “natures” competing for the same “space.” Just as there is divine concurrence with every human act, a concurrence which does not destroy the secondary actor, so the divine and human operate at different “levels” in Jesus. Concurrence is not incarnation, but perhaps there is some similarity. I don’t think that Christian teaching has always made clear that the incarnation does not imagine two natures which are on the same level. This is addressed in part by the insistence that the human nature is “anhypostatic” but this point needs to be made more explicit.

Second, NT Wright suggests in the same volume that Christology should be worked through from the ground up using “Hebraic” categories like tabernacle and temple, rather than “Greek” categories like nature, substance, and person. The problems that Norris identifies in Chalcedon indicates that this project is worth the effort.