How the Doctrine of Incarnation Shaped Western Culture

How the Doctrine of the Incarnation Shaped Western Culture by Patricia Ranft


This is an expensive book that ought to be set to a lower price point so that it is more accessible to the general reader because it makes some important points about Western Civilization and how Christian doctrine, particularly the Doctrine of the Incarnation (the “DOI”), shaped that civilization. The main thesis of the book is that because of its paradoxical and open-ended configuration, the DOI “catalyzed” intellectual development in the West that moved from theology to other areas. The author, Patricia Ranft, explains:

“mature. The doctrine of the Incarnation is a doctrine of precise balance between two opposites. The balance is the paradox and heart of the doctrine. For centuries the church carefully guarded this balance and declared theologies heretical if that balance was not preserved. With too heavy an emphasis on the divine or on the human, the paradoxical balance is lost, as is the stimulation the paradox produces. It is the doctrine's paradox and its challenge to reason that has historical impact, because it prods the human mind and makes it search restlessly for answers. If the tension between humanity and divinity is relaxed, then the stimuli is dissipated; absence of challenge invites absence of movement and change.”

Ranft breaks the book into two main parts, the first involving a discussion of the DOI in the early Christian Church, and the second discussing the high point of Incarnational doctrine during the High Middle Ages. Concerning the first, Ranft notes that Incarnational/Christological debates were the last of the “great theological debates of early Christianity,” but actually Christology was tied to both Trinitarian other disputes. Thus, the Arian controversy was Trinitarian insofar as it defined the Son as a created being, but it also was Christological insofar as it posited Christ as a kind of unified demigod of a difference substance than the Father. Ranft also notes that the Incarnation was tied to the doctrine of Creation: Athenasius's work on the Incarnation gives its first three chapters to Creation because the purpose of the Incarnation was to save Creation.

A lot of the development of these doctrines was spurred by heresies. Ranft notes that the idea of “development of doctrine” was part of the early church: Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century described a doctrine of “progress” in religion. The first chapter therefore walks the reader through various heresies including Arianism, Marcionism, Monarchianism and other heresies. This opens the way to introduce Athanasius who made a contribution to an understanding of the Incarnation. For Athanasius:

“Once recreated in their original image and likeness of God, humans can be united with God, or, as Athanasius says in a much quoted passage, “For He made men that we might be made God.”39 Thus, the Word became flesh, “to bring the corruptible to incorruption.”40 When the ‘immaterial Word of God comes to our realm,” it fills “all things everywhere” and “no part of creation is left void of Him.”41 Given the inherent weakness of human nature that “was not sufficient of itself to know its Maker,” the Word's presence in creation provided a way for creatures to learn about their Creator.”

The doctrine of the Incarnation is central to Christianity and led to “two of the chief devotions of Christianity,” namely devotion to Mary and the Eucharist. Concerning Mary, Ranft notes that “Mariology and the doctrine of the Incarnation are theologically, historically, and logically intertwined” and “The doctrine of the Incarnation includes—even demands—reverence for Mary, and vice versa.”

Mariology and the doctrine of the Incarnation are theologically, historically, and logically intertwined. If the Word Incarnate was born of Mary, then Mary is Theotokos, the Mother of God. Cyril states the connection so: “Since the holy Virgin gave birth after the flesh to God who was united by hypostasis with flesh, therefore we say that she is theotokos.”96 The doctrine of the Incarnation includes—even demands—reverence for Mary, and vice versa.

Similarly, the Eucharist was tied to the Incarnation. “The Eucharist is proof that Christ is the Word Incarnate and the Word Incarnate is one with the Father; the “verity of communion” within the Godhead “were vouchsafed us through the sacrament of the Body and Blood.”

Ranft links the DOI to changes in the fine arts and rhetoric, where the goal became truth rather than opinion. In an aside, Ranft notes the following:

“Those more familiar with the negative stereotype of medieval culture being unforgivingly univocal may at first find it hard to accept how insistent Augustine (who, we must emphasize yet again, influenced medieval society more than any other thinker) is that diversity of opinion is welcomed. “What harm comes to me, if various meanings may be found in these words, all of which are true? What harm comes to me, I say, if I think differently than another thinks as to what he who wrote these words thought?” Such intellectual activity is healthy. Indeed, it is at the heart of Augustine's own intellectual strivings. We hear this in his ruminations about how differently he would have written Genesis. “Had I then been Moses,” he hypothesizes, “I should have wished, if I had then been what he was and had been enjoined by you to write the book of Genesis, that such power of eloquence be given to me, and such ways to fashion words that not even they who cannot yet understand how God creates things would reject my words as beyond their powers; while they who can already understand, no matter what true interpretation they have arrived at in their thought, would not find it passed over in your servant's few words.”42 Christianity does not stifle rational independence and diversity but encourages it. One can hear Augustine's frustration as he asks again: “Therefore, while every man tries to understand in Holy Scripture what the author understood therein, what wrong is there if anyone understand what you, O light of all truthful minds, reveal to him as true, even if the author he reads did not understand this, since he also understood a truth, though not this truth.””

In chapter Four, Ranft argues that the DOI “prodded the West to develop one of its key traits, its emphasis on human potential.” Ranft finds this connection in Western miracle stories which functioned as signs of humanity redeemed; “in short, they are signs of human potential actualized in the single moment of the Incarnation.” Further, the idea of the Incarnation was applied to human social institutions such as when Pope Gregory defined authority in terms of the Christ's humbling service to humanity in the Incarnation. Gregory's ideas about authority had an impact on Alfred the Great's approach to ruling, his promotion of education and other matters. The Incarnation also informed the Carolingian view of Kingship which emphasized the king as a type of Christ.

In Chapter Five, Ranft transitions to the Eucharistic debates of the High Middle Ages. Eucharistic debates were debates over the Incarnation for “only the Eucharist completes the Incarnation.” Ranft begins with the traditional understanding of the church, which was Incarnational. This was recognized in the early church:

“As the second century progressed these words [John 6] became the central focus of the early apologists' discussion of the Eucharist. They drew “a close parallel between the incarnation of the Logos and the presence of the Christ in the Eucharist.” 9 Ignatius of Antioch opened the century with the confession that “I am convinced and believe that even after the Resurrection he was in the flesh,” because “the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ.” Those who do not so believe are considered unbelievers to be avoided.10 At mid-century Justin Martyr reports it being universally taught: “For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”11”

“From the High Middle Ages until the Reformation, Eucharistic theology took center stage.” The debates were high stakes games:

“The battle for control over interpretation of the Eucharist was but another battle for control over interpretation of the Incarnation. Without agreement over the meaning of the Eucharist there is no unity among Christians. Proof of this is, unfortunately, too readily available in the splintered history of Christianity. Transubstantiation, impanation, consubstantiation, annihiliation, transignification, transmutation: these are doctrinal interpretations of the Eucharist that have torn Christianity apart throughout the centuries. Why people did not fight over the doctrine of the Incarnation directly, as they did in the Nicene era, is easy to understand within the proper historical context. Disputes over the wording of the doctrine of the Incarnation were waged by theologians intent upon institutionalizing belief. Disputes over the wording of the doctrine of the Eucharist were waged by were waged by clergy intent upon institutionalizing practice.”

The ninth century Eucharistic debates began with Radbertus argument that there is nothing after the consecration in the Eucharist other than the flesh and blood of Christ. Ratramnus responded with an argument that the Eucharist was the body of Christ spiritually but not physically. “Ninth-century contemporaries saw the debate more benignly as part of a continuing argument between followers of Augustine who emphasized Christ's spiritual presence, and of Ambrose who underlined the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist.” The dispute then erupted in the mid-eleventh century with the debate between Berengar and Lanfranc. Berengar used a rational analysis which challenged the Church's understanding and Ranft argues caused the West to take a “long step to the flowering of Scholasticism.”

Ranft explains the problem that Berengar's rejection of physical reality of Christ's body in the Eucharist was that this doctrine meant the Eucharist involved a miracle, which he felt was “insulting and contemptuous” toward God. Ranft explains:

“Yet, as we have seen, in the West miracles are incarnational. They are a theophany, the place where the divine and the human intersect. For Berengar to deny or even belittle the miraculous in the Eucharist was rightly seen by his contemporaries as an attack at Christianity's core: the paradox of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Lanfranc realized this and insisted that belief in “miracles that are congruous to this faith of ours”49 be restored to the heart of Eucharistic theology: “We therefore believe that the earthly substances which on the Lord's table are divinely consecrated through the ministry of priests are incomprehensibly, inexpressibly and wonderfully by the working of divine power converted into the essence of the Lord's body.”50 This is a logic of a more profound nature, the logic of faith in the Incarnation, “for divine power, working miraculously, is able to do anything.”51 Alger of Liège insisted similarly, that the Eucharistic miracle pales in comparison to the miracle of the Incarnation. “Yet to those dialecticians asking whether the substance of the bread is converted into the body of Christ, and is no longer just bread,” Alger answers yes, that this is so because God is omnipotent [in omnibus et mirabilis]: “In his sacrament [God] makes accidental qualities exist of themselves which in other cases is impossible. Yet of this is the one who brought fertility to the Virgin without a seed, how miraculous is it if he makes qualities exist without the foundation of substance?”52”

In place of the miraculous transformation, Berengar preferred a transformation that occurred spiritually in the individual believer. For Ranft, the importance of this debate was that Berengar was gesturing toward individualism.

Ranft then turns to Anselm who embraced Berengar's rational approach and personified medieval humanism. Ranft argues that:

“Study of Christ's human nature did much to foster a new type of humanism. Key concepts such as self-knowledge, intention, affection, and friendship were major focusses in twelfth-century theology; they are also topics in modern secular humanism.” Anselm pioneered the use of reason to human psychology with respect to an analysis of the affections. Affections fall into a both/and world suited for people used to thinking in Incarnational terms:

“Affections are not only of the spirit or only of the body. They are of both. One without the other is not affection. The doctrine of the Incarnation does not state that Christ is only divine or only human. He is both. One without the other is not Christ.”

Likewise, reason fits into the same category:

“ In a more formal analysis of the will in De Similitudinibus, Anselm describes it as that which resides in the soul along with reason and appetite (affectus). Reason allies humans with the angels, appetite with beasts, but “by will to both. Will holds a middle place between reason and appetite, inclining now to reason, now to appetite.”147 The will, in other words, is the synthesis of reason and appetite much as the Incarnation is the synthesis of the human and divine.”

Ranft then discusses the role of Incarnational thinking in reforms of culture during the High Middle Ages through the thinking of Peter Damien.

Along with the catalyst of paradox, Christ's humanity offered a useful impetus by way of imitation. In the Christian world, work was sanctified, and Christians developed a work ethic from imitation of Christ:

“We can see from these examples of Cistercians theology that interpretations which hold that the order haphazardly stumbled upon economic success are highly suspect. Cistercian success was a result of their work, and their work was mandated by their theology, especially by imitatio Christi. Constance Berman's research offers ample documentation that supports this interpretation; Cistercian contributions to the economic history of the West are significant, and they aggressively and consciously pursued these contributions because of their work ethic.104 That work ethic is expressed in a sophisticated work theology firmly rooted in imitatio Christi.105 In this latter matter the Cistercians are not unique. Numerous groups and people were likewise inspired to adopt a new work ethic after first adopting imitatio Christi. All this led to a significant change in attitude toward work and the worker. Without such a change neither the legislative advances in labor relations nor the economic developments of late medieval and early mo