The subject is Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s Passion as redemptive in the Summa Theologiae. Many theologians judge that the key notion of Aquinas’s soteriology is atonement whose underlying structure is justice and also that the concepts of “redemption” and “sacrifice” are simply metaphors. Aquinas suggests that Christ’s Passion as redemptive is more than a metaphor. While writing two articles, each on the moral modes of merit, satisfaction and sacrifice, Aquinas writes four on redemption. While affirming the Passion’s two causalities, principal and instrumental, Aquinas writes that the effects are achieved in three ways: by way of exciting charity, by way of redemption and by way of efficiency. The purpose of the article therefore is to find why Christ’s Passion is so important by examining these four articles. An analysis of ST 3.48.4 shows that Christ’s Passion as redemptive is ordered toward a positive goal, the union with Christ, while atonement towards a negative one. An analysis of ST 3.48.5, shows that the divine and human causalities, principal and instrumental, so work together in affecting the will acts of Christ, elicited and commanded, that even Christ’s soul is perfected. An analysis of ST 3.49.2 shows that by way of faith in Christ’s Passion and by way of its power Christ can aid us in our struggle against sin and the devil. Finally, an analysis of ST 3.49.3 shows how Christ through Baptism, Penance and suffering aids us in attaining a perfection of soul and its powers, not immediately but through the choices we make in our life and dying. On the Last Day, when souls are joined to bodies, those, who had cooperated with Christ in their suffering and dying and thereby attained their soul’s perfection, will have achieved a glorified immortality as well as beatific vision.
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