Are There Two Consciousnesses in Christ? Transposing the Secondary Act of Existence

Abstract

Bernard Lonergan has proposed an original thesis concerning two consciousnesses, divine and human, on the part of the incarnate Word Jesus of Nazareth. But he has not specified how these are related to each other precisely as consciousnesses. He has also retrieved from Aquinas the notion of a secondary act of existence bestowed on the assumed human nature of Christ. The article draws on but also modifies Hans Urs von Balthasar’s correlation of person and mission as a way of transposing the secondary act of existence into the condition of possibility, or ontological ground, of Jesus’ mission consciousness, and then uses this transposition to begin to answer the question of how the divine and human consciousnesses are related to each other.