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We have already published treatises on the One God, the Triune
God, the Creator, and the Holy Eucharist. These have been
presented in the form of a commentary on the teaching of St. Thomas
in his Theological Summa. It is the purpose of the present treatise
on Christ the Savior to explain, in accordance with the more common
interpretation of the Thomists, the teaching of St. Thomas on the
motive of the Incarnation, the hypostatic union, and its effects.
We have discussed at length the more difficult problems, such as the
reconciliation of freedom with absolute impeccability in Christ, the
intrinsically infinite value of His merits and satisfaction, His
predestination with reference to ours, inasmuch as He is the first of
the predestined, and the reconciliation, during the Passion, of the
presence of extreme sorrow with supreme happiness experienced by our
Lord in the summit of His soul.
In all these problems our wish has been to manifest the unity of
Christ inasmuch as He is one personal Being, although He has two
really distinct and infinitely different natures. Hence the Person of
Christ constitutes the one and only principle of all His theandric
operations.
In all these questions St. Thomas, according to his custom,
wonderfully preserved the principle of economy[1] by reducing all
things to the same principles and in the ultimate analysis to the one
and only fundamental principle. Similarly, with reference to the
Passion everything is reduced to the principle of the plenitude of
grace. This plenitude, on the one hand, was the cause in the summit
of our Lord's soul of the beatific vision and, on the other hand, it
was the cause of His most ardent love as priest and victim, so that
He willed to be overwhelmed with grief, and die on the cross a most
perfect holocaust.
At the end of this treatise we have given merely a compendium on
Mariology, since a more complete commentary on this subject has
recently been published by us in the French language.
May the reading of these pages be a source of knowledge as well as of
spiritual benefit to all students of theology.
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