It takes two to tango: the hypostatic union of the changeless divinity

[21Dec17]

To be clear: I know that the divine nature and the human nature are not to be confused, and that the Son is a single person of the trinity.

God’s divine nature is supposed to have no potentialities, according to Aquinas, adopting Aristotle.

My difficulty here is the divine nature entering into a union. Surely this must be the actualisation of a potential?

The Son’s divine nature has to have changed in some way. But God is changeless.

 

[straykat]

There’s no problem with God taking on human nature. If there was, he wouldn’t be God, and subject to some law greater than himself. Jesus could make a blind man see with a touch. What do you think he did to human nature in Incarnation?

I don’t know know just how far Catholics hold on to Aristotle, but one thing I like about the Eastern fathers (even though many were Greeks themselves) is they avoided these human philosophical frameworks. It’s one of the only things I don’t like what happened to Western Europe… but that’s just me. Everyone’s got their own journey.

 

[catholic1seeks]

That the Divine nature is essentially immutable, or incapable of any internal change, is an obvious corollary from Divine infinity. Changeableness implies the capacity for increase or diminution of perfection, that is, it implies finiteness and imperfection. But God is infinitely perfect and is necessarily what He is. It is true that some attributes by which certain aspects of Divine perfection are described are hypothetical or relative, in the sense that they presuppose the contingent fact of creation: omnipresence, for example, presupposes the actual existence of spatial beings. But it is obvious that the mutability implied in this belongs to creatures, and not to the Creator; and it is a strange confusion of thought that has led some modern Theists — even professing Christians — to maintain that such attributes can be laid aside by God, and that the Logos in becoming incarnate actually did lay them aside, or at least ceased from their active exercise. But as creation itself did not affect the immutability of God, so neither did the incarnation of a Divine Person; whatever change was involved in either case took place solely in the created nature.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm#IIC

 

[BlackFriar]

So you must have problems with the first act of creation itself then?

Why stop at the incarnation?