"With sanctifying grace are inseparably connected the infused virtues, theological and moral, and so too it was in the soul of Christ. But with his human virtues I have not to deal here, since they are fully described in another [place]. I have only to remark that those virtues must be excluded from the soul of Christ which are incompatible with his impeccability and with the extraordinary perfection of his state. Hence, in the first place, there is no room for the virtue of repentance, since he had, and could have, no sin of which to repent. Nor could he possess the virtue of temperance, since concupiscence, the effect of original sin in us, could have no place in him. Finally, Christ had not, properly speaking, the virtues of faith or hope. We believe what we do not see; we hope for what we do not possess; but, as will be seen below, such was the perfection of the soul of Christ that from the very first moment of his human existence he enjoyed the beatific vision, seeing the God-head face to face, and delighting in undisturbed possession of the sovereign Good. The gifts of the Holy Ghost, too, were in the soul of Christ in all their fulness, rendering the whole of that delicate supernatural organism an apt instrument upon which God with his actual grace played that symphony of celestial melody and harmony which is the life on earth of the Word Incarnate.
"We come now to the study of a subject which is full of difficulty: that of the human knowledge of Christ. The difficulty does not arise formally from the fact that Christ, as well as being truly man, is also truly God. When once it has been understood that the two natures exist side by side, unconfused, in the same person, it follows as a necessary and obvious consequence that in Christ there is a divine knowledge identical with his divine nature and a human knowledge which is inseparable property of his humanity; and as the natures are unconfused, so there can be no confusion of his divine knowledge and his human knowledge. the one does not take the place of the other, as Apollinaris suggested, nor is the one absorbed or in any way limited by the other, as those would have it that uphold kenotic theory. If there were any such substitution, intermingling, or absorption, then indeed the difficulty would be insoluble; in fact, as we have seen, any such theories totally destroy the truth of the Incarnation. The real difficulty arises, not from the confusion of one knowledge with the other, but rather from the supernatural perfections with which, in consequence of the hypostatic union, the human intellect of Christ was endowed. Natural psychology, or the study of the natural operations of the human mind, is already sufficiently complex, but when we have to include in our study types of knowledge of which on earth we have no experience, then the difficulty of the subject is immeasurably increased. In the human intellect of Christ we have to consider the knowledge that was natural to him as man, the infused knowledge with which he was preternaturally endowed, and his beatific knowledge, whereby during the whole of his life on earth he saw God face to face.
"That Christ had natural human knowledge, few since the time of Apollinaris have dreamed of denying, the tendency outside the Church to-day being rather to deny that he has any other. For the rest, St. Luke tells us that he advanced in wisdom and, unless all of the questions that he asked of others and the surprise that on some occasions he showed are to be treated as mere pretense, we must needs admit that Christ acquired knowledge by natural experience even as we do. His senses and his intellect were essentially similar to ours, and there appears no reason why they should have been denied their natural exercise. On the contrary, if Christ had not the natural use of these faculties it would be difficult to understand why he should have possessed them. Thus the country, the village in which he was reared, the home in which he received instruction and education from his holy Mother and St. Joseph, the environment, racial, physical, and social, in which he gradually grew to manhood, all these had, in the all-wise Providence of God, their influence in the formation of his natural character and outlook, a natural character which, it is important to remember, is a necessary substratum for the perfection of supernatural perfection which makes Jesus Christ the model of perfect manhood. For it is no less true of Christ than it is of us that the supernatural perfects nature, but does not destroy it.
continued . . .
Irrefutable!