Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation

Abstract

To get a deeper grasp of the issues surrounding this question, it will be useful to have at least a passing acquaintance with the key metaphysical concepts employed in the classical Christologies propounded by Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. After providing this historical background in section I, I will go on in section II to examine a general metaphysical principle about individual human natures which Scotus and Ockham embrace without detailed argument and which has among its immediate consequences an affirmative answer to the question posed above. I will show that this principle, as well as a slightly weaker replacement, entails evident falsehoods and should thus be rejected in favor of a contrary principle, one which yields the thesis that Christ's individual human nature is necessarily such that it is united to a divine person. Finally, in section III I will formulate and examine what I take to be the strongest argument against my position. Given that my response to this argument is sound, two interesting corollaries follow for Christian metaphysics in general. First, the Christian metaphysician will have to countenance the possibility that some of a thing's necessary properties (those it has at any moment it exists in any possible world in which it exists) are not natural or essential properties (roughly, properties which it has simply by virtue of its nature or essence, including its individual essence). Second, the Christian metaphysician will be unable to subscribe to the widely accepted claim that any counterfactual conditional with a necessarily false antecedent is itself true. These two points and the connection between them will emerge more clearly below.