Redemption and Deification.

The Chalcedonian definition proclaims that Christ is consubstantial not only with His Father but also “with us.” Though fully man, Christ does not possess a human hypostasis, for the hypostasis of His two natures is the divine hypostasis of the Logos. Each human individual fully “consubstantial” with his fellow men is nonetheless radically distinct from them in his unique, unrepeatable, and inassimilable personality or hypostasis: no man can fully be in another man. But Jesus’ hypostasis has a fundamental affinity with all human personalities: that of being their model, for indeed all men are created according to the image of God, i.e., according to the image of the Logos. When the Logos became incarnate, the divine stamp matched all its imprints: God assumed humanity in a way which did not exclude any human hypostasis, but which opened to all of them the possibility of restoring their unity in Him. He becomes, indeed, the “new Adam” in whom every man finds his own nature realized perfectly and fully, without the limitations which would have been inevitable if Jesus is only a human personality.

This was a concept of Christ which Maximus the Confessor had in mind when he re-emphasized the old Pauline image of “recapitulation” in reference to the incarnate Logos²¹ and saw in Him the victory over the disintegrating separations in humanity. As man, Christ “accomplishes in all truth the true human destiny that He Himself has predetermined as God and from which man had turned: He unites man to God.”²² Thus, Chalcedonian and post-Chalcedonian Christology would be meaningless speculation where it is not oriented toward the notion of redemption. “The whole history of Christological dogma was determined by this basic idea: the Incarnation of the Word, as Salvation.”²³

Byzantine theology did not produce any significant elaboration of the Pauline doctrine of justification expressed in Romans and Galatians. The Greek patristic commentaries on such passages as Galatians 3:13 (“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us”) generally interpret the idea of redemption by substitution in the wider context of victory over death and of sanctification. They never develop the idea in the direction of an Anselmian theory of “satisfaction.” The voluntary assumption of human mortality by the Logos was an act of God’s “condescension” by which He united to Himself the whole of humanity; for, as Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, “what is not assumed is not healed, and what is united to God is saved;”²⁴ therefore, “we needed a God made flesh and were put to death in order that we could live again.”²⁵

The death of “One of the Holy Trinity in the flesh” was a voluntary act, a voluntary assumption by God of the entire dimension of human tragedy. “There is nothing in Him by compulsion or necessity; everything was free: willingly He was hungry, willingly thirsty, willingly He was frightened, and willingly He died.”²⁶ But — and this was the essential difference between the Orthodox and the Aphthartodocetae — this divine freedom of the hypostasis of the Logos did not limit the reality of His human condition: the Lord assumed a mortal humanity at the very moment of the Incarnation, at which time the free divine decision to die had already been made. “He takes a body, a body which is not different from ours,” writes Athanasius; “He takes from us a nature similar to ours; and since we all are subject to corruption and death, He delivers His body to death for us.”²⁷

The idea that the cross was the purpose of the Incarnation itself was vividly suggested by the Byzantine liturgical texts of the Nativity. The hymnology of the pre-feast (December 20 to 24) is structured according to that of Holy Week, and the humility of Bethlehem is viewed as leading toward Golgotha: “The kings, first fruits of the Gentiles, bring Thee gifts... By myrrh they point to Thy death...” “Born now in the flesh, Thou shalt in the flesh undergo burial and death, and Thou shalt rise again on the third day.”²⁸

The question whether the Incarnation would have taken place, had there not been a Fall, never stood at the centre of attention in Byzantium: Byzantine theologians envisaged rather the concrete fact of human mortality: a cosmic tragedy in which God through the Incarnation undertook to become personally — rather, hypostatically — involved. The major and apparently the only exception to this general view is given by Maximus the Confessor for whom the Incarnation and “recapitulation” of all things in Christ is the true “goal” and “aim” of creation; the Incarnation therefore was foreseen and foreordained independently of man’s tragic misuse of his own freedom.²⁹ This view fits in exactly with Maximus’ idea of created “nature” as a dynamic process oriented toward an eschatological goal — Christ the incarnate Logos. As creator, the Logos stands as the “beginning” of creation; and as incarnate, He is also its “end” when all things are going to exist not only “through Him” but “in Him.” In order to be “in Christ,” creation had to be assumed by God, made “His own;” the Incarnation therefore is a precondition of the final glorification of man independent of man’s sinfulness and corruption.

Given the fallen state of man, the redemptive death of Christ makes this final restoration possible. But the death of Christ is truly redemptive and “life-giving” precisely because it is the death of the Son of God in the flesh (i.e., in virtue of the hypostatic union). In the East, the cross is not envisaged so much as the punishment of the just one, which “satisfies” a transcendent Justice requiring a retribution for man’s sins. As Georges Florovsky rightly puts it, “the death of the Cross was effective not as a death of an Innocent One but as the death of the Incarnate Lord.”³⁰ The point was not to satisfy a legal requirement but to vanquish the frightful cosmic reality of death, which held humanity under its usurped control and pushed it into the vicious circle of sin and corruption. And, as Athanasius of Alexandria has shown in his polemics against Arianism, God alone is able to vanquish death because He “alone has immortality” (1 Tm 6:16). Just as original sin did not consist in an inherited guilt, so redemption was not primarily a justification but a victory over death. Byzantine liturgy, following Gregory of Nyssa, uses the image of the devil swallowing a hook hidden by the body of Emmanuel; the same idea is found in a pseudo-Chrysostomic sermon read during the liturgy of the paschal night: “Hell received a body and encountered God; it received mortal dust and met Heaven face to face.”

Summarizing this patristic concept of death and resurrection, in the light of the Christological statements of the fifth and sixth centuries, John of Damascus writes,

Although Christ died as man, and His holy soul was separated from His most pure body, His divinity remained with both the soul and the body and continued inseparable from either. Thus, the one hypostasis was not divided into two hypostases, for from the beginning both body and soul existed in the hypostasis of the Word. Although at the hour of death body and soul were separated from each other, yet each of them was preserved having the one hypostasis of the Word. Therefore, the one hypostasis of the Word was an hypostasis as of the Word; so also of the body and of the soul, for neither the body nor the soul ever had any proper hypostasis other than that of the Word. The hypostasis, then, of the Word is ever one, and there were never two hypostases of the Word. Accordingly, the hypostasis of Christ is ever one. And though the soul is separated from the body in space, yet they remain hypostatically united through the Word.³¹

The triduum of Easter — the three days when Christ’s humanity suffered the common fate of man, yet remained mysteriously en-hypostasized in the one divine hypostasis of the Logos — was graphically expressed in the traditional Byzantine iconography of the Resurrection: Christ trampling down the gates of Sheol and lifting Adam and Eve back to life. Better than any conceptual language and better also than the image of any particular event or aspect of the mystery — such as the empty tomb or even the crucifixion itself — this icon points to the dynamic, soteriological dimension of Christ’s death: God’s intrusion into the domain usurped by the devil and the breaking up of his control over humanity. The same mystery of hypostatic unity which remained unbroken in death itself is expressed in the Byzantine liturgy of Holy Week; on Good Friday, at vespers, at the very moment when Christ gives up the spirit, the first hymns of the Resurrection are beginning to resound: “Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ has shown Himself free from corruption.” The hidden yet decisive triumph over death permeates the liturgical celebration of Holy Saturday: “Though the temple of Thy body was destroyed in the hour of the passion, yet even then one was the hypostasis of Thy Divinity and Thy flesh.”³² One could discover in these texts the ultimate, soteriological reason why Cyril’s theopaschite formula becomes a criterion of orthodoxy in sixth-century Byzantine theology: death was vanquished precisely because God Himself had tasted of it hypostatically in the humanity which He had assumed. This is the paschal message of Christianity.

In connection with our discussion of the Greek patristic view of original sin as inherited mortality, we mentioned the concomitant understanding of the Resurrection as the foundation of Christian ethics and spirituality, for the Resurrection of Christ means indeed that death has ceased to be the controlling element of man’s existence, and man therefore is also free from slavery to sin. Death certainly remains as a physical phenomenon, but it does not dominate man as an unavoidable and ultimate fate: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Co 15:22). And Athanasius writes, “Henceforth, we are dissolved for a time only, according to our bodies’ mortal nature in order the better to receive resurrection; like seeds cast into the earth, we do not perish but sown in the earth; we shall rise again since death has been brought to nought by the grace of the Saviour.”³³ And Chrysostom: “It is true we still die as before, but we do not remain in death; and this is not to die. The power and the very reality of death are just that a dead man has no possibility of returning to life. But if after death, he is to be quickened and moreover to be given a better life, then this is no longer death but a falling asleep.”³⁴ Since death has ceased to be the only possible end of existence, man is free from fear and sin based on the instinct of self-preservation is no longer unavoidable. The vicious circle has been broken on Easter Sunday and is broken each time “the death of Christ is announced and His resurrection is confessed.”

But what does “being in Christ” mean concretely? The last quotation — from the Byzantine Eucharistic canon of St. Basil — suggests the answer: through baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist, man freely becomes a member of the risen Body of Christ.

This element of freedom — and even of “consciousness” — is essential to the doctrine of salvation as understood by the Byzantine patristic, sacramental, and liturgical tradition. On the one hand, there are emphatic affirmations of the universality of redemption. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, assures us that

As the principle of death took its rise in one person and passed on in succession through the whole of the human nature, so the principle of the Resurrection extends from one person to the whole of humanity... This is the mystery of God’s plan with regard to His death and His resurrection from the dead.³⁵

And his thoughts on the universality of redemption and “recapitulation” are echoed by Maximus the Confessor. On the other hand, the new life in Christ implies personal and free commitment. On the last day, the Resurrection will indeed be universal, but blessedness will be given only to those who longed for it. Nicholas Cabasilas tells us that baptismal “resurrection of nature” is a free gift from God given even to children who do not express consent; but “the Kingdom, the contemplation of God, and common life with Christ belong to free will.” ³⁶

Byzantine theologians seldom devote much explicit attention to speculation about the exact fate of souls after death. The fact that the Logos assumed human nature as such implied the universal validity of redemption but not the apokatastasis or universal salvation, a doctrine which in 553 was formally condemned as Origenistic. Freedom must remain an inalienable element of every man, and no one is to be forced into the Kingdom of God against his own free choice; the apotytastasis had to be rejected precisely because it presupposed an ultimate limitation of human freedom — the freedom to remain outside of God.

But by rejecting God, human freedom, in fact, destroys itself. Outside of God, man ceases to be authentically and fully human. He is enslaved to the devil through death. This idea, which is central to Maximian thought and which makes him profess so strongly the existence of a human created will in Christ, serves as the basis of the Byzantine understanding of the destiny of man: participation in God, or “deification” (theōsis) as the goal of human existence.

En-hypostasized in the Logos, Christ’s humanity, in virtue of the “communication of idioms,” is penetrated with divine “energy.” It is therefore a deified humanity, which however does not in any way lose its human characteristics. It is quite to the contrary. These characteristics become even more real and authentic by contact with the divine model according to which they were created. In this deified humanity of Christ’s, man is called to participate, and to share in its deification. This is the meaning of sacramental life and the basis of Christian spirituality. The Christian is called not to an “imitation” of Jesus — a purely extrinsic and moral act — but, as Nicholas Cabasilas puts it, to “life in Christ” through baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist.

Deification is described by Maximus as a participation of the “whole man” in the “whole God”:

In the same way in which the soul and the body are united, God should become accessible for participation by the soul and through the soul’s intermediary by the body in order that the soul might receive an unchanging character and the body immortality; and finally that the whole man should become God deified by the grace of God-become-man becoming whole man — soul and body — by nature and becoming whole God — soul and body — by grace.³⁷

“Thus, for Maximus the doctrinal basis of man’s deification is clearly to be found in hypostatic unity between the divine and the human nature in Christ.”³⁸ The man Jesus is God hypostatically; and, therefore, in Him, there is a “communication” (perichōrēsis — circumincessio) of the “energies” divine and human. This “communication” also reaches those who are “in Christ.” But they, of course, are human hypostases and united to God not hypostatically but only “by grace” or “by energy.” “A man who becomes obedient to God in all things hears God saying: ‘I said: you are gods’ [Jn 10:34]; he then is God and is called ‘God’ not by nature or by relation but by [divine] decree and grace.” ³⁹ It is not through his own activity or “energy” that man can be deified — this would be Pelagianism — but by divine “energy” to which his human activity is “obedient;” between the two, there is a “synergy” of which the relation of the two energies in Christ is the ontological basis. But there is no confusion of natures just as there cannot be any participation in divine essence by man. This is the theology of deification which we can also find in Gregory Palamas: “God in His completeness deifies those who are worthy of this by uniting Himself with them, neither hypostatically — that belonged to Christ alone — nor essentially but through a small part of the uncreated energies and the uncreated divinity... while yet being entirely present in each.”⁴⁰ Actually, the Byzantine Council of 1351, which confirmed the theology of Palamas, defined it as a “development” of the decrees of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680) on the two wills or “energies” of Christ.⁴¹ In “deification,” man achieves the supreme goal for which he is created. This goal, already realized in Christ by a unilateral action of God’s love, represents both the meaning of human history and a judgment over man. It is open to man’s response and free effort.

The Theotokos.

The only doctrinal definition on Mary to which the Byzantine Church was formally committed is the decree of the Council of Ephesus which called her the Theotokos, or “Mother of God.” Obvious Christological and not Mariological, the decree nevertheless corresponds to the Mariological theme of the “New Eve,” which has appeared in Christian theological literature since the second century and which testifies, in the light of the Eastern view on the Adamic inheritance, to a concept of human freedom more optimistic than that which has prevailed in the West.

But it was the theology of Cyril of Alexandria affirming the personal, hypostatic identity of Jesus with the pre-existent Logos, as it was endorsed in Ephesus, which served as the Christological basis for the tremendous development of piety centred on the person of Mary after the fifth century. God became our Saviour by becoming man; but this “humanization” of God came about through Mary who was thus inseparable from the person and work of her Son. Since in Jesus there is no human hypostasis; and since a mother can be mother only of “someone,” not of something, Mary is indeed the mother of the incarnate Logos, the “Mother of God.” And since the deification of man takes place “in Christ,” she is also — in a sense just as real as man’s participation “in Christ” — the mother of the whole body of the Church.

This closeness of Mary with Christ led to an increasing in the East popularity of those apocryphal traditions which reported her bodily glorification after her death. These traditions found a place in the hymnographical poetry of the Feast of the Dormition (Koimesis, August 15) but never were the object of theological speculation or doctrinal definition. The tradition of Mary’s bodily “assumption” was treated by poets and preachers as an eschatological sign, a follow-up of the resurrection of Christ, an anticipation of the general resurrection. The texts speak very explicitly of the Virgin’s natural death, excluding any possible connection with a doctrine of Immaculate Conception, which would attribute immortality to her and would be totally incomprehensible in the light of the Eastern view of original sin as inherited mortality.⁴² Thus, the boundless expressions of Marian piety and devotion in the Byzantine liturgy are nothing other than an illustration of the doctrine of hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in Christ. In a sense, they represent a legitimate and organic way of placing the somewhat abstract concepts of fifth- and sixth-century Christology on the level of the simple faithful.

Notes

1. Dec. 24, Vespers; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and K. Ware (London· Faber, 1969), p. 254.

2. Dec. 25, Matins; Ibid., p. 269.

3. Holy and Great Friday, Vespers.

4. Aug. 6, Transfiguration, Vespers; Festal Menaion, pp. 476-477.

5. Council of Constantinople, 680; Denz. 291.

6. Maximus the Confessor, Expos, orat. doming PG 90:877D.

7. John of Damascus. De fide orth., III, 15; PG 94:1057nc.

8. Denz. 222; Anathema 10 of Council of 553.

9. Leontius of Jerusalem, Adv. Nest., VIII, 9; PG 86:1768A.

10. Marcel Richard, “St. Athanase et la psychologic du Christ selon les Ariens,” Mel Set Rel 4 (1947), 54.

11. Charles Moeller, “Le chalcèdonisme et le nèo-chalcèdonisme en Orient de 451 á la fin du VI* siècle,” in Grillmeier-Bacht, I, 717.

12. See ibid., pp. 715-716.

13. John of Damascus, De fide orth., III, 21; PG 94:1084B-1085A.

14. Anonymous, De sectis; PG 86:1264A.

15. Patriarch Nicephorus, Antirrh., I; PG 100.-268A.

16. Theodore the Studite, Antirrh., III; PG 99:409C.

17. Nicephorus, Antirrh., I; PG 100:272B.

18. Ibid.; PG 100:328BD.

19. Theodore the Studite, Antirrh. III; PG 99:396B.

20. Ibid., III; PG 99:405A.

21. See especially Maximus the Confessor, Amb.; PG 90:1308o, 1312A.

22. J. Meyendortf, Christ, p. 108.

23. Georges Florovsky, “The Lamb of God,” Scottish Journal of Theology (March 1961), 16.

24. Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101 ad Clcdonium-, PG 37:181c-184A.

25. Gregory of Nazianzus, Horn. 45; PG 36:661c.

26. John of Damascus, De fide orth., IV, 1; PG 94:110lA.

27. Athanasius, De incarn., 8; PG 25:109C.

28. Dec. 24, Compline, Canon, odes 5 and 6; Festal Menaion, pp. 206-207.

29. Maximus the Confessor, Ad Thai., 60; PG 90:621 AC.

30. Florovsky, “The Lamb jf God,” p. 24.

31. John of Damascus, De fide orth., III, 27; PG 94:1097AB.

32. Holy Saturday, Matins, Canon, ode 6.

33. Athanasius, De incarn., 21; PG 25:129D.

34. John Chrysostom, In Haebr., horn. 17:2; PG 63:129.

35. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration, 16; ed. J. H. Srawlcy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 71-72.

36. Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, II; PG 150:541C.

37. Maximus the Confessor, Amb., PG 91:1088C.

38. Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 457.

39. Maximus the Confessor, Amb.; PG 91:1237AB.

40. Gregory Palamas, Against Afyndynos, V, 26; edd. A. Kontogiannes and V. Pha-nourgakes, in P. Khrestov, Gregoriou ton Palatna Syggrammata III (Thessaloniki, 1970), p. 371.

41. Tome of 1351; PG 151:722B.

42. I do not imply here that the Western doctrine of the Immaculate Conception necessarily implies Mary’s immortality although some Roman Catholic theologians have suggested this implication (for example, M. Jugie, l’Immactdee Conception dans I’Ecriture sainte et dans la Tradition orientale, Bibliotheca Immaculatae Conceptions, 3 [Rome, 1952]).

The Holy Spirit.

The early Christian understanding of creation and of man’s ultimate destiny is inseparable from pneumatology; but the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament and in the early Fathers cannot easily be reduced to a system of concepts. The fourth-century discussions on the divinity of the Spirit remained in a soteriological, existential context. Since the action of the Spirit gives life “in Christ,” He cannot be a creature; He is indeed consubstantial with the Father and the Son. This argument was used both by Athanasius in his Letters to Serapion and by Basil in his famous treatise On the Holy Spirit. These two patristic writings remained throughout the Byzantine period the standard authorities in pneumatology. Except in the controversy around the Filioque — a debate about the nature of God rather than about the Spirit specifically, — there was little conceptual development of pneumatology in the Byzantine Middle Ages. This did not mean however that the experience of the Spirit was not emphasized with greater strength than in the West, especially in hymnology, in sacramental theology, and in spiritual literature.

“As he who grasps one end of a chain pulls along with it the other end to himself, so he who draws the Spirit draws both the Son and the Father along with It,” Basil writes.¹ This passage, quite representative of Cappadocian thought, implies, first, that all major acts of God are Trinitarian acts and, secondly, that the particular role of the Spirit is to make the “first contact” which is then followed — existentially but not chronologically — by a revelation of the Son and — through Him — of the Father. The personal being of the Spirit remains mysteriously hidden even if He is active at every great step of divine activity: creation, redemption, ultimate fulfilment. His function is not to reveal Himself but to reveal the Son “through whom all things are made” and who is also personally known in His humanity as Jesus Christ. “It is impossible to give a precise definition of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, and we must simply resist errors concerning Him which come from various sides.”² The personal existence of the Holy Spirit thus remains a mystery. It is a “kenotic” existence whose fulfilment consists in manifesting the kingship of the Logos in creation and in salvation history.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 861