Did the Saviour See the Father? Christ, Salvation, and the Vision of God by O.P. Simon Francis Gaine (review)

At the outset of the first chapter, Simon Francis Gaine asks: "Was the Word made flesh blessed from the very first moment of the incarnation with the vision of the essence of the triune God in his human mind?" (3). In particular, did Christ possess the beatific vision before his resurrection, Ascension, and glorification? These are the theological questions Gaine seeks to answer in this book. The traditional answer to this related set of questions is, of course, yes, but contemporary Catholic theology is far from a consensus on this issue. In fact, if one could pick out a majority consensus about the theological teaching of Christ's beatific vision from conception, it would certainly be negative, at which Gaine somewhat playfully hints in his first chapter title, "No one thinks that anymore!" In that chapter, Gaine tells the story of how the theological teaching of Christ's beatific vision from conception transitioned from a state of nearly universal adherence among Catholic theologians to a minority position during the second half of the twentieth century. After the Second Vatican Council and the near-total "collapse" of Thomism's influence, most theologians have argued that the teaching that Christ saw the Father throughout his earthly sojourn has deleterious consequences for the integrity of Christ's human nature, among plenty of other putative problems (4). Anyone familiar with recent literature on this dogmatic question knows just how varied these criticisms are and the diversity of the problems critics identify in the teaching. The criticisms generally coalesce around the concern to foreground the similarities of Christ to us in his humanity, rather than obscuring them, as they think the traditional teaching does. To address these criticisms and "ask whether there might be a form in which the Thomist view was still viable," Gaine first thought of writing this book over a decade before its publication (12). He thought a work clarifying traditional Thomistic teaching was necessary because there seemed to be no explicit support for it in the most recent magisterium. However, in 2006, Benedict XVI approved the "notification" against two of the works of Jon Sobrino for treating Christ too much like a mere prophet with exemplary human faith. According to the notification, Sobrino had overlooked the significance of Christ's extraordinary knowledge of the Father. Thus claiming magisterial support for his argument, Gaine furnishes an account of how Scripture and Tradition render Christ's human knowledge, suggesting that modern criticisms of Christ's beatific vision fall short of their mark.

After sketching the state of modern Catholic theology on Christ's beatific vision in chapter 1, Gaine responds to the most prevalent argument against the doctrine from its supposed absence in the Bible. First, Gaine reminds us that one of the motivations for Karl Rahner's dogmatic inference of Christ's immediate self-consciousness was essentially to remove the question of Christ's human knowledge from the guild of historical-critical scholars who had called the traditional teaching into question. The result was that Scripture became regarded as of little relevance to this theological issue. So, Gaine sets out to define "how far the Bible's witness is relevant to this debate among Catholic theologians" (15). Given Scripture's position as an essential source of theology, Gaine argues that modern theologians should not set Scripture in opposition to dogmatic theology, as Rahner may have done (18). Rather, the divine inspiration of Scripture should lead us to conclude that whatever Scripture presents tells us "the honest truth about Jesus" (18). Gaine then sketches biblical teaching on the beatific vision in general, noting the theme of sight as it relates to God's presence, and the key here is the biblical intuition that seeing God this side of heaven is impossible aside from grace. Then Gaine provides an exegesis of key texts like 1...