Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

15 Ibid. , no. 473, p. 119-120.Again, see the texts cited in the reference notes from Pope St. Gregory the Great and St. Maximus the Confessor, which clearly teach that Jesus knew all things in His human soul. 16 That Jesus possessed universal knowledge in His human soul, even prior to His Resurrection, was the nearly unanimous teaching of the ancient Fathers of the Church, including St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, and St. John Chrysostom, each of whom held it to be a test of orthodoxy; see William Most, The Consciousness of Christ (Front Royal, VA: Christendom, 1980), 118-119, 123-126. The Fathers generally did not hold this view because they were bound by an a priori Greek ideal of intellectual “perfection” which Jesus had to fulfil. Rather, their most common argument was drawn from the doctrine of the Trinity: if Jesus was the divine Word incarnate, then even in His human soul, the divine Word andWisdom could not be ignorant of anything. This teaching was defended and developed later by several “Doctors” of the Church, including St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Robert Bellarmine, who divided the forms of Christ’s human knowledge into “beatific,” “infused,” and “acquired” knowledge. In the 20th century, Pope Benedict XV taught that it is unsafe to contradict the traditional teaching on Christ’s univer- sal human knowledge, and Pius XII explicitly endorsed this teaching as well in Haurietis Aquas (1956), but especially in Mystici Corporis (1943). The Catechism also seems to preserve this teaching, if entries 473 and 478 are read, as they should be, in the light of the explanatory reference notes to the text. The main arguments against the traditional teaching are (a) that the natural reading of Scripture seems to show that Jesus grew in knowledge as a youth, and even as an adult was ignorant of various empirical facts, e.g. Lk. 2:52, Mk. 5:9, 6:38, 9:20, and ignorant of the date and time of the End of theWorld, seeMk. 13:32; and (b) that if themind of Jesus on earth was continually flooded with the light of supernatural knowledge, then He could not have suffered a true agony and dereliction for us on the Cross. In response to the latter point, however, it seems to be a common teaching of the saints that even while abiding in a state of mystical union with God, a human being can experience the most terrible bodily and emotional suffering; see St. Francis De Sales, Treatise on the Love of God (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1945), 9.3 and 9.12, p. 371-372, 395-397. This would seem to be the closest analogywe possess to the spiritual con- 91 Saint Faustina and Devotion to the Passion of Jesus Christ