B. THE PERSONHOOD OF CHRIST:
TWO NATURES IN ONE DIVINE PERSON

5. THE HUMAN SOUL OF CHRIST

Divine grace made His soul holy and pleasing to God, just as it does in the souls of other men. Moreover, the soul of Christ was to be the source of the supernatural acts by which the redemption of man would be accomplished. But sanctifying grace is necessary for meritorious supernatural acts; hence the soul of Christ was given this grace. In addition, Christ was to be the source of grace for all other men. How could He give grace to others if He did not possess it Himself?

As in other men, so too in Christ, sanctifying grace brought to His soul the perfection of the supernatural virtues. But because of the perfection of Christ's grace, not all of these virtues were necessary to Christ. In the perfection of His grace Christ already possessed the vision of God. His soul already enjoyed from the beginning of its existence the happiness of seeing God face to face. Hence there was no need in Christ for the virtues of faith or hope. He did not need faith, for He saw God face to face; and He did not have to hope for what He already possessed. But Christ had the other supernatural virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost in a pre-eminent degree.

Christ also possessed to the fullest degree the gratuitous graces of which we have already spoken, including the gift of prophecy and the power of working miracles. In God's plan, Christ was to be the perfect teacher of all men; hence God gave Him these gifts to fit Him for this task.

To sum it all up, we must say that Christ possessed the fullness of grace. His soul is intimately and substantially united to God in the Person of the Son of God. Because it is more closely united to God, the source of Divine grace, than any other creature, it receives the greatest outpouring of grace. Since Christ is to communicate the grace of God to others, it must possess the greatest degree of grace.  It might be well to remark here that Christ possessed an absolute fullness of grace. We say of Mary, His Mother, and some of the Saints, that were also full of God's grace. In their case we are referring to a relative fullness of grace; they possessed as much grace as they needed to perform the work God gave them to do. But Christ had the most stupendous task of all: he had to redeem the whole human race, and hence, possessed an absolute fullness of grace.

Although the soul of Christ possessed the fullness of grace, His grace was still a created reality; it was something finite and limited in itself. It was the greatest possible participation in the Divine life, the greatest share in the Divine life  and to this extent might be called infinite. No other degree of of grace, in fact the grace of all other men and Angels put together cannot surpass the grace of Christ; but in itself the grace of Christ is still a finite created reality, although unlike the grace of other men, it is not capable of any increase; no one can gain more than the greatest degree of anything, and from the beginning Christ possessed the greatest degree of grace.

This great grace was given to Him also because of the Divine plan that he was to be the Head of the whole human race in the spiritual order. Adam is the head in the natural order of the body. He was also the spiritual head before his sin. By his sin he lost God's grace for himself and for all his descendants, and in this way he ceased to be the head of the human race in the spiritual order. However, God determined to restore grace to the human race, and He made Christ the new spiritual head of all men. It is in this sense that the Fathers of the Church called Christ "the second Adam." From Adam until the end of time, all grace comes to men from Christ. Since His own personal sanctifying grace is the source of grace for all men, His grace is sometimes called capital grace or the grace of headship, which we will cover in a later segment. But for now we need to go deeper into the human nature and knowledge of Christ: Please continue to the next segment.