One Drop is an Ocean of Forgiveness [1]

There is a phrase in the tradition: “Even one drop of the most precious blood would suffice for the redemption of the world” (Sufficeret ad redemptionem orbis, vel una pretiosissimi sanguinis gutta).¹ The basic idea is that Christ is so precious and so innocent that even the slightest suffering would have been enough to win our salvation. The fact that he suffered in the extreme is due not to any strict necessity, but rather only to the boundlessness of his love, which would not settle for “just enough” to get us by.

The history of this saying is quite interesting. Sources since the twelfth century have attributed it to Bernard of Clairvaux, but it actually appears to derive from a sermon on the feast of the exaltation of the cross by Nicholas of Clairvaux (aka Nicholas of Montiéramey). This sermon appears in a collection of sermons by Peter Damian, but it was identified by the renowned scholar Jean Leclerq as belonging to Nicholas instead.² This new attribution is ironic, however, because Nicholas was a rather unscrupulous monk who became known for his flamboyant plagiarism. He was Bernard’s secretary until Bernard fired him for sending fraudulent letters in his name. A few months later, Nicholas sent a sort of c.v. to a noble in order to get a job, and he included a large collection of writing samples as evidence of his literary skill. However, that packet of “Nicholas’s” writings contained “nine sermons attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, and seventy-four short commentaries to the Psalms that are ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor.”³ It’s surprising that Nicholas’s own work would accidentally be assigned to someone else, given that he was in the habit of ascribing the works of others to himself.

This confusion likely only added to the authority of his “one drop” (una gutta) statement, which became a topic of discussion for later texts such as the Summa Halensis and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. It didn’t function alone, however. Rather, the “one drop” dictum came to embody a deeper tradition about the absolute gratuity of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, a gratuity that was already central to Anselm’s theory of satisfaction. For Anselm, the debt that we owe for sin is infinitely unrepayable,⁴ and yet this infinity is countered by the greater infinity of Christ’s gratuitous self-gift.

Thomas agreed with this tradition even though his deep engagement with Aristotle also made him wary of the concept of infinity.⁵ Like others before him, Thomas saw the infinite merit of Christ’s sacrifice as deriving from the infinite dignity of his divine personhood.⁶ While he did believe that Christ underwent the greatest suffering of all, this suffering was greatest not because he underwent every particular suffering (he wasn’t burned or drowned, for example) but because he endured every class of suffering and endured them to the fullest.

This is key: from a Catholic standpoint, there is no strict proportionality between the debt owed for sin and the punishment undergone by Jesus Christ. Anselm does argue that restitution ought to be proportional,⁷ but he ends up insisting that Christ dramatically overpays nonetheless. In short, there is a fittingness to the extent of Christ’s suffering,⁸ but the real reason that he allowed himself to be brutalized to such an extent is nothing but purest love. This infinite gratuity helps to break us out of any economic reckoning for sin. Redemption is not a quid pro quo; Christ does not render back unto the Father exactly and only what we owe. Rather, he sets up a counter-economy of salvation that entices us too to freely give our whole lives for the sake of others.

Next time, we’ll see how this “one drop” dictum ends up shaping an entirely different discourse within Protestant theology.

1. PL 144:762. ↩︎
2. Jean Leclerq, “Les collections de sermons de Nicolas de Clairvaux,” Revue Bénédictine 66 (1956): 269–302. ↩︎
3. Jeroen De Gussem, “Bernard of Clairvaux and Nicholas of Montiéramey: Tracing the Secretarial Trail with Computational Stylistics,” Speculum 92, no. S1 (2017): S195. ↩︎
4. Cur Deus Homo 2.14. ↩︎
5. Christian Tapp, “Infinity in Aquinas’ Doctrine of God,” in Analytically Oriented Thomism, ed. Mirosław Szatkowski (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2015), 93–115. ↩︎
6. ST III q. 46 aa. 5–6. ↩︎
7. Cur Deus Homo 1.20. ↩︎
8. Aquinas, Quodlib. II q. 1 a. 2. ↩︎