[The following are extracts taken from Select Disputations, 2:164-172]
This passion of the soul of Christ consists in the penalty of loss and the penalty of suffering. The penalty of loss is the deprivation or loss of joy and delight, which the full vision and enjoyment of God and the plenitude of grace would have brought to Him, and this is through rejection from the face of God or abandonment (see Matthew 27, Luke 22, which we will discuss shortly). This includes the tasting and perception of divine wrath and light (the wrath is denoted by the cup in Matthew 26:39, 20:22, John 18:11, collated with Psalms 75:9, Habakkuk 2:16, Jeremiah 25:15, Isaiah 51:17), the subjection to the power of darkness, at least for vexation, not for servitude (Luke 22:53, collated with John 14:30, Genesis 3:16). Also, the curse, by which the full sentence of divine judgment for the sins of men was carried, and the sign and symbol of this was the ignominy of the cross (Galatians 3:13). The subject of this passion is Christ according to human nature, firstly and fundamentally in the higher or rational part of the soul, and secondly or by participation in the lower or sensitive part of the soul. He perceived God as wrathful, that is, He did not feel joy, which usually emanates from trust, but instead experienced pressure and vexation arising from God's wrath against our sins and consequently against Himself as the Bridegroom. The first and principal efficient cause is God, the most just judge, pursuing justice through His wrath, following Christ as the Bridegroom, not because He was worthy of any wrath, but on account of us and our sins, which He bore, being cursed. He withdrew His countenance, from which all joy was taken away, and He showed Himself stern. We deduce this necessary distinction from Galatians 3:13, Isaiah 53:4, Zechariah 13:7, collated with Matthew 3:17, Ephesians 1:6. The proximate impulsive cause is our sins, the next is the voluntary offering of Christ and the acceptance of our sin-bearing. The end and effect of this spiritual death are both the satisfaction and merit for us and the manifestation of glory, justice, truth, power, and divine mercy in our redemption. This is derived from commonplaces about the humiliation, passion, and satisfaction or merit of Christ, and analogically applied here. The proper, next, consequent, and effect of this spiritual death is horror, pain, distress, and perturbation, as mentioned in John 12:27, Luke 12:50, Matthew 26:39, Luke 22:24, Hebrews 5:7. We reject the Papists who argue that Christ felt no passion in the higher part of the soul in our place. See them refuted by Parker, book 3, n. 75. 76.
The adjuncts and peculiarities of this passion are, indeed, comparative. Firstly, that it was the greatest because it equated the entire misery that our sins deserved. Secondly, that it was most worthy and precious. Thirdly, that it was unique and most singular without example or likeness concerning the subject, causes, and effects. Fourthly, that it was the same as the punishments of the damned, the same, I say, essentially concerning its material aspect and as far as it proceeded from extrinsic causes, and the same analogically or by equivalence concerning its formal aspect in the ratio of compensatory and satisfactory punishment. Fifthly, however, it was different in its accidental or concomitant aspects and consequences, as they cannot satisfy these punishments by enduring them. 1. Regarding the material aspect and as far as it arises from intrinsic causes due to the defect and imperfection of the damned, such as despair, blasphemies, and a worm-like conscience, things absent from Christ's passion. 2. Regarding the formal aspect: it was different in terms of the circumstances of formal penalty, so-called. Thus, Christ's punishment could not and was not eternal; He was able to deliver Himself (Acts 2:24). He was not in hell, in the place and company of the damned and demons. Nor was it continuous and equally intense; His own arm supported and refreshed His soul intermittently, with moderation applied and intervals of granted relief internally, and externally with the confirmation of an angel, so that He could properly prepare for death, attend to the fulfillment of His duties through conversations, admonitions, responses, and the imposition of tasks; neither His mind nor senses were shattered, as stated in Luke 22:40, 41, 43. For He was the Son of God who suffered; thus, His intensive gravity and value arising from the dignity of His person not only compensates for the entire duration of the penalty but also breaks and removes it by the power with which He could overcome all punishment (1 Corinthians 15:57). In short, we outline the entire difference with these antitheses: It was holy, not sinful; pure punishment without guilt; glorious and not merely burdensome; He bore it in our name, not for Himself; not as the just, holy, blessed one, but as our sponsor and debtor, made sin for us, and a curse (2 Corinthians 5:21, Galatians 3:10) through transfer and imputation; voluntary, not coerced; out of obedience to the Father, not out of merit, or rather any demerit of His own; out of love for us, not out of compulsion from His own power, not only out of weakness; for struggle and vexation, not for victory and subjection; for satisfaction, not for perdition; through the fire of divine wrath burning and afflicting, not indeed consuming to the lack of the sense of divine sweetness, not to the removal of grace from the personal union emanating from the blessed vision, not to the dissolution of the union; for the suspension of the effect of joy, not for the overthrow of the principle and root; for the eclipse of act, not habit; for the eclipse of influx and reception on the part of the soul of Christ (due to the intervention of sin and divine wrath), not the efflux from the part of the Deity; partial, not total; temporal, not final or eternal; interrupted over intervals, not continuous; with moderation, not uniformly intense; and thus with the integrity of faith, trust, and hope, not with unbelief or despair.
This passion or death of Christ can be divided, according to its stages, into the non-passion and the passion: the former was a preliminary and preparatory phase, which His soul gradually experienced in the course of life, as I infer from Luke 12:56 and John 12:27. The latter is what He sustained at the end of His life, and it is either initiated or completed, either in the garden or on the cross. The initiation is described in Luke 22:40, 41, 42, 43, 44, along with Matthew 26:56, 45, Mark 14:33, 40, and Hebrews 5:7. It is called by Blessed Luke "agonia," from the Syriac interpreter "timor," with which the Arabic language also agrees. With this, the struggle of Christ in the face of the terrible judgment of an angry God and the supreme anguish of wrestling is indicated, to the extent that all His faculties temporarily left their functions to relieve His nature. As for the mode, causes, subject, and adjuncts of this agony, there is no need to repeat what we have covered in the superior doctrine and specifically apply it here, as this should be evident to anyone. We will only note the adjuncts, concomitants, and consequences by which Scripture presents the gravity of this agony before our eyes. These are four: 1. horror, 2. sweat like drops of blood, 3. sorrow unto death, arising from the contemplation of divine wrath and judgment, which the mind and memory of Christ were solely fixed upon at that time, so that, without sin regarding other objects, they rested, no differently than a clock can cease its movement after the hand of the craftsman, extrinsically moved, stops it; as Parker excellently explains and defends against the calumnies of the Papists in his work (Book 3, sections 102, 104, 105). To enhance understanding, we add that Christ's apprehension or understanding of divine justice and wrath or God as an angry and stern judge was distinct from His apprehension and understanding of God as a beloved father and deliverer. These two apprehensions do not conflict but only differ; they are distinct in their formal objects and diverse in their effects. The formal object of the former apprehension was God's punitive justice or God as a stern judge, while the object of the latter was the same God but as a beloved Father, gracious God, and faithful Liberator. From the former apprehension arose or was stirred up the affect of sadness or sorrow from the sense of present evil and the affect of fear from the expectation of future evil; from the latter apprehension, the affect of trust. These affects could coexist in Him, and neither displaced the other. Thus, in that paroxysm or agony, when sorrow and fear occupied Him, there was no lack of trust, for His mind was nonetheless fixed on His God as His own, and His will was projected onto Him. Regarding the objection that He did not elicit both apprehensions or intuitions of God as an angry judge and as a beloved Father and Liberator at the same time and in equal measure, nor consequently elicit acts of fear and trust simultaneously in that moment, I respond: while we attribute an immediate passion to Christ, we do not assert that, in Christ, any contrary or privative unbelief, doubt, distrust, let alone despair, from us should be admitted or posited.
Only this much remains to be addressed, that such a non-thought and non-actual trust or cessation of the act, while habitual faith and trust persist, has not yet been proven to be a sin in our Savior. How the Papists try to extricate themselves here can be seen in the commentary of Cornelius à Lapide on Matthew 26:37. II. His withdrawal from the disciples and His return to them, requested by them for assistance in prayer (Matthew 26:38, 40). III. Sweating blood (Luke 22:44). Some have denied this sweat, to the point of sacrilegiously expunging His words from the context, causing it to be absent in some copies, as testified by Jerome in his work Against Pelagians and Hilary in On the Trinity, chapter 10. Others diminish it and think it should be taken proverbially, such as Euthymius and Theophylactus; others attribute it to a miracle. Thus Hilary, who says it was against nature.
And some Papists, including Thomas from Bede, Jansenius in Concordia Evangeliorum, chapter 137, and among our own, including Parker, claim it was supernatural. Platerus, a medical expert, adds his opinion in the third book of his practical treatise, chapter 5, page 673, stating that blood can sometimes infiltrate through the pores of the skin or spread beneath the skin, remain there, and produce a swelling, but it does not penetrate and transude through them, either through the anastomosis of skin veins or through diapedesis or rarefaction of the cuticle, because the division of the continuity of the skin itself is required for its emanation. Some leave it in the middle, such as Hofmeister in his commentary on Luke, and thus not a few from our own. Others acknowledge this natural sweat but attribute its cause either solely to the fervor of praying (Bilson on the Descent into Hell) or solely to the apprehension and fear of bodily death, as most Papist commentators, nearly all of them, including Lyranus, Maldonatus, Jansenius, Hofmeister, etc. And Polemicists in the question of the Descent into Hell, among whom Lavinus Lemnius in Book 1 of his work on natural miracles, chapter 12, makes a contribution. They make the cause of this sweat only a sensation of pain and disturbance of the sensitive part, not the rational part. Although many from the Papists hold this view, Lemnius disagrees with them clearly in the cited work. We, no less than the flow of blood and water from Christ's side, posit as natural, due to the immediate proximate cause; however, it is admirable and miraculous in nature, even supernatural if we consider the remote efficient causes and the end. We believe the proximate cause can be found in the affections and their movement, namely, in the affections of sorrow and fear that partly draw the Spirit and blood toward the heart from external parts, and partly in the affections of love, desire, ardor, and zeal (Luke 22:44), which impel the Spirit and blood from the heart toward the external parts of the body. Hence, it happened that the blood, like a whirlpool agitated and thus attenuated, erupted along with the serous fluid from the veins through the skin. Philosophers and physicians attest to the possibility of such a phenomenon, especially if the texture of the body and skin is rarer, as advised by Aristotle and Sennertus (Book 2, Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 8). Experience supports this reasoning. It is established that sudden intense disturbances can cause people to suddenly die or develop gray hair (Scaliger Exercitation 3.12). Lemnius, in his work on natural miracles, Book 2, Chapter 7, says that from consternation and the imagination of sorrow, blood can move to and fro and burst forth.
Through illness and bodily conditions, blood has been shed from fingers, breasts, eyes, ears, etc. (Schenck, Observations, Volume 2, Book 4, No. 257, 266, 268). Indeed, it is reported that the head and chest of a certain individual, three days before death, released blood (Ibid, Book 6, No. 138). Platerus, in his practical treatise, Book 3, Chapter 5, mentions a boy with hydrophobia whose pores over most of his body were marked with blood. Aristotle, in Book 3 of his Parts of Animals, Chapter 5, and Book 3 of his History of Animals, Chapter 19, Theophrastus in his book on Sweats, Galen in On the Utility of Respiration, and Mercurialis in his book on Skin Diseases, Book 3, Chapter 1, testify to having observed blood sometimes being shed from the extremities of veins that terminate in the skin. Fernelius, in Book 6 of his Diseases of Parts, Chapter 4, states that he observed blood occasionally flowing from the extremities of veins that end in the skin. Sennertus, in his Institutions, Book 2, Part 3, Section 10, Chapter 11, reports, citing Benivenius, that a pound of blood flowed through the skin, where the lower part of the liver lies, each month, even though no hole or scar appeared on the skin. This is particularly related to the blood that Aristobulus expelled suddenly due to sorrow over the crime of fratricide (Josephus, The Jewish War, Book 1, Chapter 3), and that which usually bursts forth from the lips of George Castriota during battle, due to the ardor of fighting, as reported by Scultetus in his treatise on Prayer, Chapter 19. An example of someone drenched in blood-sweat was heard in Paris after receiving a death sentence, as reported by Maldonatus in his commentary on Matthew 26, where he agrees with us that this sweat was natural. Why he expressed it in this way, so as to make it appear as if the sweat was only supernatural, as the learned Parker acknowledges (Book 3, No. 110, 112), I confess I have not yet seen. Beza, in his notes, calls this sweat evidence of human weakness; therefore, it was natural. Nevertheless, it remains and is very well defended that this initial death or agony was spiritual in the soul, and the immediate cause of this sweat in Christ was supernatural—namely, the apprehension and fear not only of bodily death (as wrongly asserted by Maldonatus) but rather of the sins He had taken upon Himself and the wrath and severe divine judgment He bore for that reason, although, rightly stated, it is said to be natural due to the proximate cause just explained. Problem: Can it be properly said that Christ, as a priest, was sanctified and prepared for an imminent sacrifice by this sweat? No, according to Parker, Book 3, No. 112.
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