Cardinal Newman explains: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse16.html
Feingold also talks about this in comment 4 there is an audio---start listening around minute 29: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/#comment-7760 A few notes from this audio: He refers to Christ making all of humankind's sin present to himself.
The greatest of all the pains of Christ would be this weight of human sin seen in all its disorder, malice, and cruelty in its offense to God. We don't know what sin is (that is why we do it) -if we knew what it was we wouldn't do it. But we don't know what it is. Now Jesus is the only one who perfectly knows what sin is because He knows the Father. If sin is an offense to the love of God, to the mercy of God, well, if you don't know God and the extent of His love, sin seems like little, but if you perfectly know God , then you know what sin is. So really Jesus is the only one who could properly do contrition for sin. We don't grasp what sin is because we don't know God and so it would have been precisely Jesus who could do ,as it were, an act of contrition for all of our sins.[around minute 38-9]
Contrition is the sorrow for sin that we should feel. We feel contrition in proportion to our charity. The more charity the more we feel contrition, the more we are sorry that we have offended God. Christ is the only one who could love God as God deserves to be loved, and thus the only one who could properly atone.
Now he made himself victim of our sins and he took them upon himself as if He were the culpable party and thus prostrated himself spiritually before God in solidarity with us because He is our head. He became man precisely to be the head of the human race and that means putting himself in solidarity with all human sin.(around 42 minutes into the lecture). So this would be the heart of the passion--the secret heart in which He makes himself, as it were, [he is not responsible-Christ can't lie to himself] but because of the solidarity of love He took our sins as His so as to atone for them since we don't . So he would make the act of contrition that we should , but don't. So it would be a kind of rending the heart for offending God . So Christ in Gethsemane had more sorry than any man could have---more sorrow then all of mankind combined, I think is the right way to understand this. Because he is experiencing sorrow for all.humans.........for every human being....So that is the meaning of what Isaiah said, Surely he has born our infirmities and carried our sorrows [alright, interiorly].
[he quotes someone here around 43.30--a preacher from the 17th century Botsway or something] Truly the grief alone of this would have killed him if he had not held back his soul in order that he might still [because it was not his time to die the night before at Gethsemane.he had to be crucified, ..but it could have killed him if he had let it] but he would not, he did not will to die on the Mount of Olives but he shed his blood, the blood he shed in the sweat of his agony, in order to show us that sin alone without the help of an executioner was sufficient to strike his death blow..............
This shows the principle cause of his death isn't Caiaphas, isn't Pilate ,....the principle cause is us.-of all sin of all human history. .....But he chose to have an executioner to add to his suffering.--all the dimensions of suffering. ...physical as well as interior.
Now we see the full extent of this in his words , 'My God my God, why have you abandoned me.' These are puzzling words to exegetes, to theologians. What could he mean by that? .......The text he is citing Psalm 22, which is a messianic psalm precisely about Christ's death...................So the first thing is doing is showing that psalm is being realized in his person [so that is one sense]. The psalm ends with his triumph--with the conversion of the Gentiles as the fruit of his suffering............But how should we take it.......abandoned in the sense that the hypostatic union was broken? No, that is totally impossible. alright what God took on He never relinquishes. So when the Son of God took the humanity of Jesus to be His that remains for eternity even in the tomb. Even in the tomb Jesus' body was the body of God and Jesus' soul separated was the soul of the son of God. --the human soul of the Son of God [46.39 on the video]. So it is not that the hypostatic union was broken or something so that Christ was in interior reality abandoned by God, certainly not! So it doesn't mean that .
So what does it mean? Does it mean he was abandoned by not being loved by God, obviously not. No, in fact, this would be when he is most lovable. He is always lovable , but here he is more lovable than ever and that is preciously why he wanted to suffer all of this so that we would love him. Was he abandoned in the sense of suffering the pains of Hell? Some theologians hold this. What should we think about that? What are the pains of Hell in essence? Desperation --could Christ suffer desperation? No. Hatred of God for putting you there--could Christ suffer that?---of course not. The pains of Hell are pains that Christ could not suffer because they are the most opposite of Him that can be conceived. So he suffered, but not that--he suffered contrition which is very different than......... the remorse of an unrepentant person that is not contrition [48.07]-[which ]-is in a sense hatred of God's justice --that's the pains of Hell. Christ did not suffer that. Was he abandoned by loosing the beatific vision? Some theologians think this.I think it is a mistake.Because it was precisely the vision of God that enabled Him, we said, to fully suffer for every human sin, because it enabled him to see as it were every human sin. So it wouldn't be in that way either that he was abandoned.
So how then, was he abandoned? Well, St.Thomas Aquinous, [speaks of it in two senses] exteriorly and interiorly, in the emotional level. Exteriorly it is easy to see, that is obvious. We say that when parents abandon a child they don't protect it, right? They let it suffer, whatever comes its way when you abandon a child. Well, certainly Jesus was abandoned in that way.......now it is his hour, the hour in which , as it were, abandoned, turned over to all the powers of darkness, turned over to all his adversaries and above all, the principle adversary which isn't Caiaphas, but Satan. So he was abandoned in that sense of not being protected, of being allowed to be buffeted by Satan in every way that Satan wanted. And of course Christ wanted it because He wanted that precisely to redeem us. So that is, I think, the more obvious sense in which He was abandoned. Right, and that doesn't cause any particular difficulty [around minute 49].But I believe there is a more profound sense as well that St. Thomas Aquinas... [and others bring out] . That he would have been abandoned in the sense of emotional desolation. And this is something the great saints are given the privilege of sharing, as it were and we call that the dark night of the spirit. ....There are 2 dark nights according to the mystical writers. One dark night that purchased?? [maybe purged?(not sure I got this right) the soul of attachments to sensible consolations--that wouldn't be this. But there is another dark night in which the saint is purged, as it were, even from any consolation that is purely spiritual--the consolation of having a sense, say of heaven ,of the presence of God, a sense of a reality of the goodness of God...............[he mentions mother Theresa of Calcutta--50 years having this--this is not the doubting of faith/ no, on the contrary it is the extreme strength of faith that God allows these trials in the saints so that faith can be strengthened because it gets no support from feeling. It is the lose of any feeling of God's presence so that the saint has to go by faith alone. St John of the Cross is the one who brilliantly analyses this. But this is just a hint/ Christ does not allow his saints to suffer more than he does. He gives them a tiny taste of what He drinks to the full. But that is how we should try to approach it. That he would have experienced all emotional desolation that is possible to experience. And that make sense because when you are thinking about sin and its hideousness, its deformity, ...what it causes...the love that it extinguishes, the love of God it tramples, when you think about that of course those reflections create desolation, they don't create consolation.
And so we can not penetrate Christ's emotional life. But the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas , has this principle, which I think is very wise,/ because of original sin our emotional life has a life of its own . We can't dominate it; that is one of the effects [concupiscence] of original sin that we are not able to rationally control our passions.We can, to the extent that we acquire virtue to a certain extent.. , but we can't simply feel what we will to feel. But Christ could because he was immune to original sin. He was an unfallen, perfect man and he would have had a perfect dominion over his emotional states so he would have willed his emotional state to do what he wanted it to do which is to atone. In other words to experience every desolation which is the worse kind of suffering--the suffering of the most extreme depression and desolation.
Now how could he have suffered this [54.57minutes into audio]-St Ignatius explains this in His spiritual exercises--the experience of desolation. Darkening of the soul, troubling of the mind, movement to base and earthly things, restlessness,feeling apathetic, tepid,...separated from one's creator and Lord. Well, clearly that is what Jesus willed to feel, emotionally even though he is the most closely united to God. [hypostatic union--he is God]. But he willed to feel separation emotionally which we call desolation. He could do this because he had control of His emotional states, but it is a kind of miracle because normally what happens in the spiritual life is that the saints are normally the most joyful people because they have the most lively awareness of the goodness of God. Even the saints who are going through the dark night of the soul, we don't see it, we look at Mother Theresa and we thought she was joyful. But normally there is a certain overflow from the higher part of the soul to the lower part of the soul . The higher part would be that that lives by faith, hope, and charity. The lower part would be our feelings Jesus wanted to experience this dark night to the fullest.
That is the way we should understand those words, My God my God why have you abandoned me. Exteriorly yes, but also interiorly to atone.
[he mentions that John Paul II in the year 2000 (number 27 of some doc) spoke of this in one of his documents--the saints give us insights into some of these theological realities of faith and the gifts of wisdom, understanding and knowledge.] HE speaks of the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. We can experience two different things at once if they have different causes. We can experience one type of emotional experience that has one cause and we can experience another one which has a different object. Because of the unity of the soul, normally it doesn't completely happen. Normally an overflow from one to another, but in Jesus he willed to do away with that overflow, we said. So there could be one and the same time a certain bliss or peace and at the same time the most excruciating pain. [joy and suffering can be present together in holy souls--can be both blissful and afflicted.] The bliss is seeing the glory of God, but the affliction is seeing precisely the glory of God offended by all human sin and they go together. It is precisely the knowing God that enables the knowledge of sin to be so afflicting.[he talks of some saints that felt this ] Even in the depths of Christ ' pain , he died imploring forgiveness of his executioners and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment.'Father into your hands I comment my spirit.' And we should see in that line something of peace. The peace of having done what He was born to do.....now he has drunk his chalice to the bottom. So there is the joy have having redeemed mankind.
So both things are happening at once and we to can be involved in both things.Our sins were the cause of his pain.......but we can console him through our fidelity, because that to he saw.
NOTE: refutations of Balthasar’s claim that Christ did not have the beatific vision, is Unam Sanctum Catholicam‘s “Balthasar, Christ and the Beatific Vision.”
This above is a great link---just wanted to put a tiny bit of quotes from it:
O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself" (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 48, 75).
and
If Christ possesses the Beatific Vision, as Pius XII clearly teaches, then He cannot experience faith. The Beatific Vision is simply the consummation of sanctifying grace, which ends in a participation in the very life of God. It is the end to which Faith tends. Therefore, if Christ in His human soul is already at that terminus, He cannot possess Faith, a virtue which is proper only to those who do not yet see God. But Christ does see God. For this reason, too, He does not have hope. "For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen, is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for?" (Rom. 8:24
andDoes the Beatific Vision render the suffering of the cross "innocuous", as Balthasar asserts?
St. Thomas easily explains how the bodily suffering of Christ can be reconciled with the Beatific Vision, since bodily pain is felt with the lower powers of the soul and the joy Christ experiences through the Beatific Vision is limited to His spiritual soul. Thomas says:
"As was said above, by the power of the Godhead of Christ thebeatitude was economically kept in the soul, so as not to overflow into the body, lest His passibility and mortality should be taken away; and for the same reason the delight of contemplation was so kept in the mind as not to overflow into the sensitive powers, lest sensible pain should thereby be prevented' (III, Q. 15, art. 5).
This follows from the nature of the Incarnation, in which Christ, because of His union to the eternal Word, should experience the Beatific Vision, but as true man should still suffer the conditions natural to man (sensible pain, hunger, etc).
A larger problem is how Christ could experience the spiritual joy of the visio beatifica and at the same time experience the interior, spiritual sorrow necessitated by the Passion. There have been various theories on this, but St. Thomas teaches, in the words of Dr. Ott, "that he bliss proceeding from the immediate vision of God did not overflow from the ratio superior (=the higher spiritual knowledge and will directed to the bonum increatum) to the ratio inferior (=human knowledge and will directed at the bonum creatum) nor from the soul to the body." Thus, Christ experiences sorrow and sadness in His soul insofar as His truly human soul is directed towards things of earth; but insofar as Christ's soul, reason and will are fixed on God, He experiences joy. This joy of the higher reason (ratio superior) does not overflow into Christ's ratio inferior (STh III, Q. 46, art. 8).
cocernting it is finished
in comment 12 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/01/indulgences-the-treasury-of-merit-and-the-communion-of-saints/#comment-48459
Hart implies that the Catholic doctrine of the communion of the saints conflicts with Christ’s statement “It is finished.” But that is not true. The “It is finished” refers to Christ’s Passion. It does not refer to the participation in, and extension of Christ’s redemptive work by the members of the Body of which He is the Head. Jesus wasn’t saying that St. Paul’s sufferings were already completed, the sufferings that filled up what was lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Colossians 1:24). If Hart asserts otherwise, he is simply begging the question against the Catholic doctrine
from comment 397 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/
St. Thomas discusses it in ST III, 50, Article 2.
Such forsaking is not to be referred to the dissolving of the personal union, but to this, that God the Father gave Him up to the Passion: hence there “to forsake” means simply not to protect from persecutors. or else He says there that He is forsaken, with reference to the prayer He had made: “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass away from Me,” as Augustine explains it (De Gratia Novi Test.).
.. regarding the "no king but Caesar" mention: It was not the crowd who called this, but the chief priests (Jn 19:15). And that was a play at Pilate's Achilles heel: he was automatically suspect by Caesar because of how Pilate got his job.
Pilate might have been trying all along to shift the blame for Jesus's execution from himself onto the Jewish leadership. It was Passover week, remember, when passions ran high. Jesus still had thousands of devotees who were unaware that he had been arrested overnight. Might they riot in protest? It was a real danger,as Matthew explicitly records the chief priests realized; it was the reason they decided not to snatch Jesus during the daytime. If a riot there might be, Pilate might have thought, best to preemptively divert its rage away from the Romans and onto Caiaphas and company. Pilate would not be able to sit it out, but reporting to Rome that the people were rebelling against their own religious authorities, not Caesar, was infinitely better than the other way round.
But while Pilate was trying to play Caiaphas, the high priest, knowing well Jesus's popularity among the masses (as well as his allies among some members of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus, for example) may well have been trying to set up Pilate to take the heat for him, also. Both men may have wanted to put the monkey on the other's back. This would help explain why Caiaphas gave Jesus such a cursory hearing before trundling him over to Pilate and the resistance to executing Jesus that Pilate gave right back to Caiaphas.
Caiaphas finally played his trump card. The Roman emperor was Tiberius, who had pretty much checked out of affairs of state in 26 c.e., moving to isle of Capri and living la dolce vita. He had left state affairs to Praetorian Prefects Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Quintus Naevius Sutorius Macro, neither of whom were loyal to Tiberius. By the time of Jesus' trial, Tiberius had taken power again after learning that Sejanus was actively plotting actual sedition and usurpation against him. He had Sejanus executed and began executing Sejanus' partners and political appointees by the dozens. Pilate owed his office to Sejanus but escaped the purge probably because his appointment was made in the very earliest days of Sejanus' rule, well before Sejanus began plotting against Tiberius.
Even so, Pilate must have known that his own political, and probably physical, survival depended on demonstrated devotion to Tiberius. This was Pilate's political Achilles' Heel and it was there that Caiaphas aimed a nearly-explicit threat: if you free Jesus we will report to Rome that you failed to defend Caesar against an insurrectionist, a pretender to the throne of Antipas, a Roman vassal, whom we do not recognize as legitimate in the first place, but matters not, for, "We have no king but Caesar," Pilate. How about you?
So Pilate felt compelled to act.
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