“Ave gratia plena dominus tecum” (“Greetings most favored one! The Lord is with thee”) The representation of Gabriel’s voice is interesting. His words are drawn in a straight line from his mouth to Mary’s ear. She’s visibly shrinking back from the angel, not sure what to expect from this encounter. There’s a similar Annunciation dating from slightly later at the Getty Museum, but overall it’s interesting that “word balloons” of one type or another never really caught on, especially when you consider how universally they are used today in narrative art.
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In his book The Strangest Way, Fr. Robert Barron relates this scene from the Purgatorio: When Dante and Virgil come to Peter’s Gate, the portal to the mount of Purgatory proper, they face a great bronze door with three steps in front of it colored white, black, and red. These stand for the three attitudes of the repentant soul: confession, contrition, and satisfaction:
“In the brightly polished white of the first step, sinners see themselves with clarity and uncompromising honesty; in the black of the second step, they appreciate the hard, grinding work of contrition, feeling the pain that sin has caused themselves and others; and in the red of the third step, they sense the work of satisfaction that must be done. Acknowledging sin is not enough; restitution must be made in order that justice (right order) might be restored. The word “satisfaction” comes from the Latin satis facere, literally, to make enough, to do the required work.”
The souls doing their purgatorial work release themselves from bondage, because only they know when satisfaction has been done. In the film The Mission, Mendoza, a mercenary and slave trader, murders his brother in a jealous rage. Overwhelmed with guilt, he sits in a squalid cell, refusing to communicate or eat. The Jesuit missionary Fr. Gabriel challenges him with brutal directness, and Mendoza agrees to accompany him to his mission deep in the jungle. But the murderer resolves, as a penance, to drag behind him a terribly heavy bundle containing the accoutrements of his former life — swords, helmets, muskets, and the like.
Through jungle, over mountains, up streams, the poor man drags this load, until his fellow travelers have had enough. They beg Fr. Gabriel, saying, “We think he has taken this far enough.” The priest responds, “But he doesn’t think so, and until he does, I don’t think so either.” Only when he has lugged his penitential burden up a steep cliffside and arrived at the mission does Mendoza relent. When the bundle is cut away, he breaks down in tears both remorseful and joyful: finally he knew that satisfaction had been made. This is Dante’s third step of red.
A lot of what is related in The Mission originates not only in Dante but in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas:
From The Bible To Aquinas
What does this mean, that “the goal of the Incarnation is `our furtherance in good,’ and that ‘it occurred in order to free us from the thraldom of sin … by Christ satisfying for us’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1.2]? The roots of the idea lie in the Bible. One of the most prominent and influential teachings in the New Testament is that people subject to sin are restored to a right relationship with God by virtue of Christ’s suffering and death. New Testament authors tend to state this as a fact. They do not explain how the operation works. [1Corinthians 15:3; Romans 5:6 ff]
Sometimes, however, they describe the role of Christ by means of language influenced by the Old Testament notion of acts of atonement (‘at-one-ment’/'bringing together’), by which people do what is needed on their part for sin to be forgiven by God. Thus, for example, the author of 1John calls Christ “the expiation (hilasmos) for our sins’, and St Paul asserts that he is `a means of expiation’ (hilasterion) [1John 2: 2; Romans 3:25. Scholars vary in their translation of hilasterion. Some prefer `propitiation' to `expiation'. Cf. John Ziesler, Paul's Letter to the Romans (London, 1989), 112 ff.]‘
In Hebrews 9, Old Testament images connected with atonement abound with reference to Christ’s death. The general idea seems to be that this was the definitive means by which people are reconciled to God, a means which supersedes the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the Middle Ages there were differing interpretations of these texts. Abelard, for instance, argued, or has been thought of as arguing, that they are best understood as teaching us that God has forgiven our sins and provided us with an inspiring token of his love.
It seems to us that we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this: that through the singular grace manifested to us in that his son took our nature and that teaching us both by word and example he persevered even unto death, Jesus bound us closer to himself by love, so that, fired by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charity would no longer be afraid to endure anything for his sake.
[Epistles ad Romanos 2]
Abelard seems to hold that, if God wills to forgive sin, the sin is forgiven and that is the end of it. He also seems to hold that God has willed to redeem humanity. It appears, therefore, that he believes that the death of Christ is not strictly necessary as a means of forgiving sin or reconciling people with God. Rather, it is God loving us in human form and drawing us to himself as we recognize the extent of his love. As one commentator explains, for Abelard, Jesus was not the Man of Sorrows carrying the burden of our guilt or the victim offered up to the Father as a recompense for our sins, so much as the divine Logos made manifest to the world, incarnate because he would reveal to mankind the path of righteousness. is that people subject to sin are restored to a right relationship with God by virtue of Christ’s suffering and death. New Testament authors tend to state this as a fact. They do not explain how the operation works.[1Corinthians 15:3; Romans 5:6 ff]
Sometimes, however, they describe the role of Christ by means of language influenced by the Old Testament notion of acts of atonement (‘at-one-ment’/'bringing together’), by which people do what is needed on their part for sin to be forgiven by God. Thus, for example, the author of 1John calls Christ “the expiation (hilasmos) for our sins’, and St Paul asserts that he is `a means of expiation’ (hilasterion) [1John 2: 2; Romans 3:25. Scholars vary in their translation of hilasterion. Some prefer `propitiation' to `expiation'. Cf. John Ziesler, Paul's Letter to the Romans (London, 1989), 112 ff.]‘
In Hebrews 9, Old Testament images connected with atonement abound with reference to Christ’s death. The general idea seems to be that this was the definitive means by which people are reconciled to God, a means which supersedes the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the Middle Ages there were differing interpretations of these texts. Abelard, for instance, argued, or has been thought of as arguing, that they are best understood as teaching us that God has forgiven our sins and provided us with an inspiring token of his love.
It seems to us that we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this: that through the singular grace manifested to us in that his son took our nature and that teaching us both by word and example he persevered even unto death, Jesus bound us closer to himself by love, so that, fired by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charity would no longer be afraid to endure anything for his sake.22
Abelard seems to hold that, if God wills to forgive sin, the sin is forgiven and that is the end of it. He also seems to hold that God has willed to redeem humanity. It appears, therefore, that he believes that the death of Christ is not strictly necessary as a means of forgiving sin or reconciling people with God. Rather, it is God loving us in human form and drawing us to himself as we recognize the extent of his love. As one commentator explains, for Abelard,
Jesus was not the Man of Sorrows carrying the burden of our guilt or the victim offered up to the Father as a recompense for our sins, so much as the divine Logos made manifest to the world, incarnate because he would reveal to mankind the path of righteousness. [J. G. Sikes, PeterAbailard (Cambridge, 1932), 208.] Much more widespread than Abelard’s view, however, was the one classically associated with Anselm, for whom the death of Christ brings us to God because it is a matter of `satisfaction’ (satisfactio).
The word `satisfaction’ was a key-term in Roman law. As F. W. Dillistone explains:
[I]t was a word bearing the fundamental idea that wherever the harmonious ordered working of the whole society has been disturbed by a failure to comply with its essential laws … an adequate reparation must be offered not only in the sense of doing now what was originally commanded but also of offering now an extra which can be accepted as sufficient payment for the delinquency.
[F.W. Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of Atonement (Welwyn, 1968), 188]
For Anselm, `satisfaction’ sums up the significance of Christ’s death since, in his view, the death of Christ made amends required to offset the consequences of sin. We have seen how he denies that sin can be simply forgiven by God. He thinks that compensation has to be made, and here he has in mind a giving back of what is not owed. That is to say, the compensation must be a matter of satisfaction. `Every one who sins,’ he argues, `ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God. [Cur Deus homo? I.II.] And, for Anselm, the satisfaction owed here is provided by the death of Christ.
Why? To begin with Anselm suggests that, because satisfaction involves paying more than what is owed, it is necessary that the one who makes it `somehow gives up himself, or something of his, which he does not owe as a debtor’. [Cur Deus homo? 2.11.] He then goes on to argue that Christ can satisfy for the sin of human beings by dying since sin deserves death and since Christ was sinless.
Is it not proper that, since what is human has departed from God as far as possible in sin, that which is human should make to God the greatest possible satisfaction? … Now nothing can be more severe or difficult for a human being to do for God’s honor, than to suffer death voluntarily when not bound by obligation. . . Therefore, the one who wishes to make atonement for human sin should be one who can die by choosing to do so. [Cur Deus homo? 2.11.]
According to Anselm, Christ made perfect satisfaction for sin, and thereby made it possible for others to turn to God and enter into the destiny originally intended for them, by going to his death without constraint and out of love for others.
Aquinas on Satisfaction
When Aquinas declares that we are freed from sin `by Christ satisfying for us’ he comes very close to Anselm’s position. For one thing, he believes in that in certain circumstances there is a need for satisfaction. He thinks that people who sin produce a kind of disharmony between themselves and God which needs to be erased if proper relationships with God are to be established again. How is it to be erased? Aquinas is clear that the sinner must refrain from sin. But he does not think that things are made right between sinners and God simply because sinners stop sinning. `If someone is parted from another’, he observes, `that person is not reunited to the other as soon as the movement ceases; the person needs to draw nigh to the other and to return by a contrary movement. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 86. 2] On this basis, therefore, Aquinas maintains that repentance is in order. He also thinks that sinners must do something to make up for what they have done in sinning. His view is that sin deserves punishment since it transgresses the order of divine justice. So compensation must be paid.
A sinful act makes people punishable in that they violate the order of divine justice. They return to that order only by some punitive restitution that restores the balance of justice, in this way, namely, that those who by acting against a divine commandment, have indulged their own will beyond what was right, should, according to the order of divine justice, either voluntarily or by constraint be subjected to something not to their liking. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 6]
One might say that God can merely forgive a person who has sinned. And Aquinas would agree. But he would add that forgiveness without compensation does not do enough to meet the requirements of justice. If you wrong me, I may forgive you and act as if nothing has happened. But even my forgiveness cannot abolish the fact that something has happened and that you are, in a sense, indebted to me. By the same token, so Aquinas thinks, for the consequences of sin to be properly dealt with the sinner must take on some form of penance to atone for the sin, or must patiently bear with one imposed by God. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 6] In other words, sinners must acknowledge the need for satisfaction, which Aquinas also sees as having a remedial or healing effect. As he says in his commentary on the Sentences:
Satisfaction can be defined in two ways. One way is with respect to past faults, which it heals (curat) by recompense; thus it is said that satisfaction is a recompense for injury according to justice’s measure. This is also expressed in Anselm’s definition that satisfaction gives to God an honour due him, due because of a fault committed. Satisfaction can also be defined with regard to future faults, from which one is preserved (praeservat) by satisfaction.
[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 4. 15. 1].
In the Sentences treatment of satisfaction, Aquinas is drawing on two influential definitions of ‘satisfaction’, one from the Liber ecctesiasticorum dogmaticum, 54 (thought by Aquinas’s contemporaries to be by Augustine, but actually produced by Gennadius of Marseille (c.470)), the other from Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? The first definition runs: `Satisfaction is to uproot the causes of sins and to give no opening to their suggestions’ (Satisfactio est peccatorum causas excidere et eorum suggestionibus aditum non indulgere). The second definition is: `Satisfaction consists in giving God due honor’ (Satisfactio est honorem Deo impendere).
In general, then, Aquinas is at one with Anselm in his view that sin requires satisfaction. He also agrees with another element in Anselm’s position. Anselm presupposes that it is possible for satisfaction to be made by someone other than the person who has sinned, and Aquinas shares Anselm’s presupposition here. He does not think that one person can satisfy for another where the satisfaction is thought of as only remedial. He accepts that satisfaction can have a healing effect in the sense that one who makes it behaves in a proper way and may be improved by doing so. But, since my improvement is a fact about me, not you, he denies that, if you make satisfaction on my behalf, it follows that you improve as well.
On the other hand, he allows that you may take on yourself the punishment due to me for my sin. In Galatians 6:2, St Paul writes: `Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.’ With this injunction in mind, Aquinas holds that, just as it is possible in law for people to pay fines on behalf of each other, so it is possible for people to take on themselves the penalty of other people’s sin. He writes:
Satisfactory punishment has a twofold purpose, viz, to pay the debt, and to serve as a remedy for the avoidance of sin. Accordingly, as a remedy against future sin, the satisfaction of one does not profit another, for the flesh of one person is not tamed by another’s fast; nor does one person acquire the habit of well-doing through the actions of another, except accidentally … On the other hand, as regards the payment of the debt, someone can satisfy for another, provided that the person in question is in a state of charity.
[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 4. 20. 2.].
Elsewhere Aquinas makes the point by saying that `in some cases those who are different in their purely penal obligations remain one in will, through their union in love. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 7]
From all of this, it should be evident how the thinking of Anselm and Aquinas overlaps on the question of satisfaction. Not surprisingly, therefore, it also overlaps when it comes to satisfaction and the Incarnation. For with the Incarnation directly in mind Aquinas offers what one might readily be forgiven for reading as a paraphrase of Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? argument.
Justice demands satisfaction for sin. But God cannot render satisfaction, just as he cannot merit. Such a service pertains to one who is subject to another. Thus God was not in a position to satisfy for the sin of the whole of human nature; and a mere human being was unable to do so … Hence divine Wisdom judged it fitting that God should become human, so that thus one and the same person would be able both to restore the human race and to offer satisfaction.
Compendium Theologiae ch. 200
`A mere human being’, Aquinas observes at one point, `could not have satisfied for the whole human race, and God was not bound to satisfy; hence it was fitting for Jesus Christ to be both God and human. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2]
People effectively make satisfaction for an offence when they offer to the one who has been offended something accepted as matching or outweighing the former offence. Christ, suffering in a loving and obedient spirit, offered more to God than was demanded in recompense for all the sins of the human race, because first the love which led him to suffer was a great love; secondly, the life he laid down in atonement was of great dignity, since it was the life of God and of a man; and thirdly, his suffering was all-embracing and his pain so great. [Summa theologiae 3a 48.2]
A sin committed against God, says Aquinas, `has a kind of infinity from the infinity of the divine majesty’. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2 ad2] For proper satisfaction of sin, therefore, `it was necessary that the act of the one satisfying should have an infinite efficacy, as being of God and of what is human’. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2 ad2]
Although one person can satisfy for another. . . that person cannot satisfy for the whole race because the act of one mere human individual is not equal in value to the good of the whole race. But the action of Christ, being that of one both divine and human, had a dignity that made it worth as much as the good of the entire human race, and so it could satisfy for others.
[De veritate, 29. 7.]
Aquinas also holds that the fact that Christ is without sin means that he can satisfy for sin properly. Commenting on the phrase `through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus’ in Romans 3: 23, he suggests:
It is as if someone, having committed some fault, became indebted to the king and was obliged to pay a fine. Someone else who paid the fine for this person would be said to have redeemed the person. Such a debt was owed by the whole human race because of the sin of the first parents. So it was that no other one apart from Christ was able to satisfy for the sin of the whole human race since he alone was free of every sin.
[Super epistolam ad Romanos lectura 3.1]
On this basis, Aquinas is able to say that Christ was both a priest and a victim, and that his work bore the character of sacrifice. Christ is a priest since he mediates between people and God and since `the characteristic function of a priest is to act as mediator between God and his people’. He communicates to people the things of God and somehow makes reparation for sin. [Summa theologiae 3a. 22. 1] Christ was simultaneously priest and victim, Aquinas goes on to say, since his priestly work was achieved by his offering of himself as a sacrifice (i.e. as something `placed before God with the purpose of raising the human spirit to him’). [Summa theologiae 3a.22.2]
Yet Aquinas’s teaching on the satisfaction of Christ is not quite that of Anselm. For, unlike Anselm, Aquinas does not think that God can only unite people to himself by means of satisfaction. Anselm does seem to think this. At any rate, he does not entertain the notion of it not being so. But the emphasis with Aquinas is different. As Romanus Cessario states, in his thinking satisfaction `is not something God requires of man, or even of Jesus, as a condition for accomplishing his saving plan. Rather it is the means whereby (God in very fact accomplishes his plan to bring all men and women into loving union with himself. [Romanus Cessario, OP, The Godly Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anseim to Aquinas (Petersham, Mass., 1990), xviii.]
We have already seen that Aquinas explicitly holds that people can be brought to God without satisfaction since we have noted him maintaining that `God in his infinite power could have restored human nature in many other ways’ than by becoming incarnate. Or as he says in another place: `Simply and absolutely speaking, God could have freed us otherwise than by Christ’s passion, for nothing is impossible with God [Summa theologiae 3a 46.2] Now we need to note that he also maintains both that God can pardon sin without exacting any penalty and that there are important senses in which the passion of Christ was unnecessary. `If God had wanted to free people from sin without any satisfaction at all’, he writes, `he would not have been acting against justice.’
God has no one above him, for he is himself the supreme and common good of the entire universe. If then he forgives sin, which is a crime in that it is committed against him, he violates no one’s rights. People who waive satisfaction and forgive an offence done to themselves act mercifully, not unjustly.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.2 ad 3]
As for Christ’s passion, says Aquinas, this was not necessary in the sense that it was something `which of its nature cannot be otherwise’, i.e. it was not logically necessary. [Summa theologiae 3a 46.1] Nor was it necessary in the sense of being forced on God or Christ by an agent apart from them. `It was not necessary for Christ to suffer from necessity of compulsion, either on God’s part, who ruled that Christ should suffer, or on Christ’s part, who suffered voluntarily.’ [Summa theologiae 3a 46.1]
With respect to satisfaction and Christ, Aquinas’s position is that satisfaction by Christ is necessary only in two senses. The first is a purely logical one. Given that God has ordained that people be brought to God by satisfaction through Christ, and given that God knows how people are to be brought to God, then satisfaction by Christ is necessary.
Since it is impossible for God’s foreknowledge to be deceived and his will and ordinance to be frustrated, then, supposing God’s foreknowledge and ordinance regarding Christ’s passion, it was not possible at the same time for Christ not to suffer and for people to be delivered otherwise than by Christ’s passion.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.2 ]
Secondly, so Aquinas argues, satisfaction through Christ is necessary in the sense that it is a means of bringing people to God in a way that accords with God’s justice and mercy.
That people should be delivered by Christ’s passion was in keeping with both his mercy and his justice. With his justice, because by his passion Christ made satisfaction for the sin of the human race; and with his mercy, for since no single human being could alone satisfy for the sin of all human nature. . . God gave people his son to satisfy for them. . . And this came of more copious mercy than if he had forgiven sins without satisfaction.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.1 ad 3]
Aquinas thinks that God could have acted only out of mercy. But he also thinks that in Christ’s passion God was acting both out of mercy and out of justice. He admits that people could have been brought to God without the Incarnation and, therefore, without Christ suffering. But he is governed by the recognition that the Incarnation and the death of Christ have, in fact, occurred. And he thinks it is good that this should be so. His line is that, where an offence against God is at issue, full satisfaction is possible, and that God has actually laid this on. Given the desirability of full (or, as Aquinas calls it, `condign’) satisfaction, his conclusion, then, is that everything possible has been done to set matters right between people and God. `It was’, he explains, `more fitting that we should be delivered by Christ’s passion than simply by God’s good will.’ [Summa theologiae 3a 46. 3]










