So while Christ is composite, he is not (in Aquinas’s terminology) a whole made up of parts. This sounds strange to us, but again, it is merely a verbal matter. Aquinas gives a technical meaning to the word “part” that makes it (for him) a poor word for describing Christ’s natures, but when he denies on that basis that these natures are “parts” of Christ, he is not denying what twenty-first-century English speakers would be affirming in calling them “parts.”
