Annotation CXXXIV

”He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High.” — Luke 1:32

Whether the soul of Christ has omnipotence equal with God.

Ambrose, in the commentaries on Luke — as the Master of the Sentences reports — seemed to attribute to the soul of Christ omnipotence equal with God: which the theologians do not accept, lest they equate the creature with the Creator. For indeed, when he was interpreting this passage, he wrote thus: “‘Not for this [reason],’ says the angel, ‘will he be great — because before the Virgin’s childbearing he was not great; but because the power which the Son of God has naturally, the man was to receive in time, so that the man and God may be one person.’” The Master of the Sentences, book 3, distinction 14, resolving the ambiguity of this saying, says that it is to be understood of the person — not inasmuch as [he] is [the person] of God, but inasmuch as [he] is [the person] of man: for although the person of the Son of God and of the son of man is one, yet inasmuch as [he] is the person of God, he always and naturally had omnipotence; but inasmuch as [he] is [the person] of man, he did not always have [it], because he did not always exist. And according to this — that [he] was going to be the person of man — [the man] was to receive in time the power which naturally and always he had had inasmuch as [he was] the person of God. This passage, which almost all the scholastics allege from Ambrose’s commentaries on Luke, we — although we have long and much searched in all the Ambrosian works — have nevertheless not yet found. William Opembacchius and Henry Hayton, on the third [book] of the Sentences, cite the same from the commentaries of Bede on Luke: but neither in those does it stand. These [things] it pleased [me] to note on account of those who, content with mere anthologies, are loath to unroll the very writings of the authors. We meanwhile — since we are compelled to turn over the fathers with nightly and daily hand — if perhaps we shall come upon this passage, and others like it, wrongly adduced, will restore [them] to their authors with unbroken fidelity.