Triumphant Love

In one of the many wonderful passages in his Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple, Matthew Levering points to the Abelardian dimensions of Thomas’s atonement theology: 

“for Aquinas, as for Abelard, the person who meditates upon Christ’s passion is able to ‘[know] thereby how much God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return, and herein lies the perfection of human salvation’ God’s movement of love toward us inspires, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a corresponding movement in us toward God. By this love, we appropriate the reconciliation gained for us by Christ’s passion” (60). Only a faith that works through love can unite us to Christ’s passion.

This is an expression of Thomas’s conviction that the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice lies in the charity with which Jesus makes His offering to the Father: “Aquinas can . . . hold that Christ’s charity governed the very entrance of the nail into his flesh. Christ’s charitable will must actually permit the inflict of the wounds of the crucifixion because Christ’s ‘spirit had the power of preserving his fleshly nature from the infliction of any injury; and Christ’s soul had this power, because it was united in unity of person with the Divine Word.’ In short, he can truly affirm that ‘Christ’s love was greater than his slayers’ malice.’ Although Christ’s passion may seem to represent the triumph of sin, it is in fact the triumph of the charitable human will, acting as an instrument of the divine will” (60).