Every so often I come against someone who is defending a Christological view I want to call “mononoetism”: that Christ has only one mind. While the Third Council of Constantinople condemned the errors that Christ has only one will (monothelitism) or only one natural operation (monoenergism), I do not know of any conciliar condemnation of mononoetism. Nonetheless, I think the reasoning behind the condemnations of monothelitism applies to mononoetism.
Mononoetism could in principle come in three sorts: Christ has only one mind and it’s a human mind; Christ has only one mind and it’s a divine mind; Christ has one hybrid human-divine mind. I think the first and second options are non-starters. If Christ has only a human mind, he’s not consubstantial with the Father. If Christ has only a divine mind, he has not taken on the human nature. So we should only consider the hybrid human-divine mind view.
But a hybrid human-divine mind view seems to be the kind of “confusion and mixture” between human and divine natures that the Council of Chalcedon objects to. Indeed, the letter of Pope Agatho, approved by the Council, shows that the opposition to monothelitism is just a working out of the teaching of earlier Councils, and Agatho’s reasoning applies just as much to the mind. Just replace “will” with “mind” here:
While if it is asserted that there is but one will in him (which is absurd), those who make this assertion must needs say that that will is either human or divine, or else composite from both, mixed and confused, or (according to the teaching of all heretics) that Christ has one will and one operation, proceeding from his one composite nature (as they hold). And thus, without any doubt, the difference of nature is destroyed, which the holy synods declared to be preserved in all respects even after the admirable union. Because, though they taught that Christ was one, his person and substance one, yet on account of the union of the natures which was made hypostatically, they likewise decreed that we should clearly acknowledge and teach the difference of those natures which were united in him, after the admirable union. Therefore if the proprieties of the natures in the same our one Lord Jesus Christ were preserved on account of the difference [of the natures], it is congruous that we should with full faith confess also the difference of his natural wills and operations, in order that we may be shown to have followed in all respects their doctrine, and may admit into the Church of Christ no heretical novelty.
Next, let’s think about the Trinity, and ask if there are three minds or one in the Trinity. On the mononoetism under consideration, Christ has to have the hybrid mind without also having a divine mind (or else he would have two minds: a hybrid one and a divine one). Then if all three Persons have one mind, it follows that the Father and Holy Spirit also have a hybrid human-divine mind, which is plainly absurd—it implies a partial Incarnation by the Father and by the Holy Spirit. So the mononoetist has to hold that each Person of the Trinity has a distinct mind. Mononoetism about Christ implies trinoetism about God.
Trinoetism about God seems to violate divine simplicity, but a trinoetist about God is likely to deny that, holding that mind does not go with the single divine substance or ousia but with the three Persons or hypostases. But let’s think this through. The argument from mononoetism about Christ to trinoetism about God is a special case of a general principle that what there is one of in Christ there is three of in God and vice versa. If the general principle holds, then we have to hold that there is one will in God. For if there were three wills in God, we would have one will in Christ, and that’s the condemned heresy of monothelitsm about Christ. Furhermore, the idea of three wills in God requires a story about why it is metaphysically impossible for these wills to disagree (for if they could disagree, then the three persons couldn’t each be omnipotent!). The best story would be a subordinationist one—the Son and Holy Spirit’s wills are obedient to the Father. But this seems contrary to the equality of the Trinity.
So let’s take it that God has but one will. Mononoetism about Christ has, however, led us to the idea that God has three minds. How does one will in three minds work? A will decides between options presented by a mind. But now things start to fall apart again. Even if the contents of the allegedly distinct minds of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the same, there is still the question of which mind is the one that is informing the one divine will. If only one or two minds are informing the divine will, we lose the equality of Persons in the Trinity—one or two Persons are partly left out of decisions. So probably one has to say that the one divine will, uniquely, is equally and overdeterminately informed by three minds. This doesn’t seem right. For a person’s will looks to the person’s own mind. (Objection: If Alice loves Bob, she looks to Bob’s mind in her decisions. Response: Yes, but only indirectly by mirroring the contents of Bob’s mind in her mind.) And, besides this, it seems that divine simplicity requires that the divine will and the divine mind are the same thing, which completely rules out the idea of one will with three minds.
We can repeat the argument of the previous paragraph with operations or energeiai. Monoenergism about Christ is condemned. Christ has two operations. On general principles, then, we would expect one operation in the Trinity, just as one will. But if there are three minds, it seems there are three operations, since a mind operates (its operation grounds the thinking of the person or persons who with the mind).
Next, let’s think about the alleged hybrid human-divine mind of Christ. In forming this hybrid mind, the divine mind of Christ seems to have changed—it has hybridized. For if it has not changed, then we still have the divine mind in addition to the hybrid one. But divine minds cannot change, since God cannot change! Indeed, the divine mind is presumably timeless. If it is timeless, it eternally exists. Thus it seems that on mononoetism Christ does have two minds after all, and so we do not have mononoetism: he has the hybrid mind and the eternally existing divine mind. This is, however, a kind of difficult argument to run. Can one not make the exact same objection to the Incarnation? How can the divine Person not change in the Incarnation? Well, orthodoxy says that the divine Person remains a divine Person. But on the hybrid human-divine mononoetism, the divine mind does not remain a divine mind, or else Christ would have two minds.
Perhaps, though, the mononoetist can try for a “smaller” version of the Incarnation: just as the divine Person comes to take on humanity, so we have one Person with two personal natures, human and divine, the divine mind comes to take on human mentality, so we have one Mind with two mental natures, human and divine. Perhaps ths would allow one to avoid the rather monstrous sounding “hybridization” that I have been assuming earlier. But here is a problem. By divine simplicity, the only distinctions in God are relational distinctions between the Persons. If God has one mind, that mind is identical to God. As argued earlier, if there is one mind in Christ, there are three in God, one per Person. But by the only-relational-distinctions principle, the mind of each person must be identical to the Person. If then the divine mind of the Logos comes to take on human mentality, so that it is both a human mind and a divine mind, like the Logos taking on humanity so that the Logos is both human and divine, then since the divine mind is identical with the Person, the Logos, it follows that the Person also takes on human mentality. Thus, the Logos is now three things: God, human and a human mind. We can say that the Logos became man, but we can also the Logos became a man’s mind. This requires a kind of inhuman relationship between the man and the man’s human mind: Jesus is Jesus’s human mind (which on this version of mononoetism is also identical with Jesus’s divine mind). Of course, Cartesians who think you are your mind won’t think there is anything strange about that. But they are wrong! And it would be very odd if Cartesianism were true about Jesus but about no one else. That would seem to undercut the idea that Jesus is like us in all human things but sin.
It is thus quite difficult to hold to mononoetism about Christ while rejecting monothelitism and monoenergism. And in any case there is a neat inductive argument: two wills, two operations, so probably two minds.
3 comments:
Your instinct to resist “mononoetism” is sound, but the debate clears up once we use the Church’s classical categories. In Catholic (and broadly patristic–Thomistic) Christology, “intellect” and “will” are not properties of a person as such; they are faculties of a nature. What is multiplied or not multiplied depends on how many natures are in view, not how many persons. Hence the two anchor points that govern the whole question: in the Trinity there is one divine nature, therefore one divine intellect and one divine will, possessed wholly by the three Persons; in the Incarnate Lord there are two natures, therefore two intellects and two wills, both belonging to the one and the same Person of the Word. Once that axiom is in place, the chain of alleged entailments in favor of “one mind in Christ” simply collapses.
Start with the Trinity. There is no need to posit “three minds” in God. The Fathers insist that the Persons are distinguished by relations of origin, not by separate sets of cognitive faculties. There is numerically one divine essence, and therefore numerically one divine knowing and one divine willing—the same single simple act of intellection and volition subsisting in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. When Scripture speaks distinctively of the Persons, it does so without dividing the operations ad intra, and in the works ad extra it gives us inseparable operations: the Persons act as one principle, even when missions are properly appropriated. So the step from “deny a single mind in Christ” to “affirm three minds in God” is a non sequitur, because it trades on a false principle: it treats “mind” as if it tracked persons rather than nature. The Church’s rule is the reverse: mind and will follow nature.
Now consider Christ. Chalcedon solemnly taught that the one Person is “to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation,” each nature preserving its properties. A “hybrid” human-divine mind is thereby excluded on the spot, because it confuses and mixes what must remain distinct. At the same time, the integrity of the assumed humanity requires a rational soul with its proper intellect and will; otherwise we fall back into Apollinarianism, which the Church rejected precisely because “what is not assumed is not healed.” The Third Council of Constantinople, working out Chalcedon’s implications, taught two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ—again because will and operation follow nature. By parity of reasoning there are two natural intellects in Christ: the uncreated divine intellect of the Word and the created human intellect of His rational soul. None of this divides the subject. One and the same hypostasis of the Logos personally subsists in, and personally exercises, both sets of faculties; He knows and wills divinely according to the divine nature, and He knows and wills humanly according to the human nature. Saint Maximus’s famous formulation captures it: “One and the same performs the divine and the human,” the distinction lying not in two agents but in the two modes of operation proper to the two natures.
This also dissolves the “informing one will with three minds” worry. In God there is one will because there is one nature; there are not “three minds” competing to “inform” it, since the single divine intellection and volition are identical with the one simple essence. In Christ there is a divine will and a human will; they cannot disagree because the grace of union and the perfect habitus of charity carry the human will into unfailing conformity with the divine—without erasing its freedom or its properly human mode (here the patristic distinction between natural and gnomic willing is decisive: Christ lacks a fallen, deliberative “gnomic” will born of ignorance, but He fully possesses the natural human will). Hence the Gethsemane prayer is not a tug-of-war between two personal choosers; it is the one Son addressing the Father while humanly shrinking from death and humanly submitting that very shrinking to the Father’s salvific decree.
Nor does dyonoetism imply change in God. The Incarnation is not an alteration in the Word; it is the assumption of a complete human nature into the subsistence of the Word. Creation changes; the Creator does not. The divine intellect remains timeless and simple; the human intellect begins in time, learns discursively, and—uniquely in Christ—also enjoys the beatific vision and infused knowledge from the first moment of His conception (as the scholastics carefully argue). This is why Scripture can truly say, on the one hand, “Lord, you know all things” and, on the other, “Jesus advanced in wisdom and stature”: both are predicated of the one Person under different natures. That is the communicatio idiomatum at work, not a “hybridization” of faculties.
Finally, the Cartesian worry that “Jesus would just be His human mind” arises only if we import a modern identification of person with a standalone thinking substance. Classical hylomorphism says otherwise: the human “mind” is a faculty of the rational soul, which is the form of the human body; in Christ that complete human nature is anhypostatic in itself and finds its subsistence enhypostatically in the eternal Son. So the subject of every act is the divine Person; the diversity lies in the natures and their proper operations. The upshot is neat and orthodox: deny “mononoetism,” not because we are inventing a new label, but because the Church’s settled principles already exclude it. Two wills, two operations—and, by the same logic that will and operation follow nature—two intellects; one acting Subject, “our one Lord Jesus Christ,” true God and true man.
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