Christos Yannaras

Jesus Christ
Chapter 8 of Elements of Faith:
An Introduction to Orthodox Theology
(T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 89-120.

a. The scandal
The name “Jesus Christ” cuts the history of mankind in two, but at the same time it has
constituted and still constitutes the greatest scandal for human thought. It is God who has
become man, and such a union remains incomprehensible to logic and inaccessible in any
way whatever to “positive” knowledge.
The Apostle Paul first noted that for the Greeks, at least, the concept of divine-humanity is
really “foolishness” (1 Cor 1.23). The Greeks taught people correct reasoning and
methodical knowledge, which cannot function without the definition of things. And things,
whatever exists, are defined by their essence, that is, by a total of properties which make
each thing that exists to be what it is. A flower is a flower since it has a stem and ‘petals and
sepals and stamens and a pistil; it cannot be a flower and simultaneously have feet or wings,
eyes to see or a voice to speak. And so even God, in order to be God, must be infinite,
unlimited, omniscient, omnipotent, life itself and principle of motion; he cannot be God and
simultaneously have a material and limited body, need oxygen to breath and food for
nourishment, become tired, be sleepy, be grieved, suffer bodily.
The opposition of Greek thought to the concept of divine-humanity was expressed powerfully
within the bosom of the Christian Church itself Two very characteristic expressions of this
opposition were the heresies of nestorianism and monophysitism which troubled the
Christian world for entire
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centuries and which never ceased to represent two tendencies or inclinations in the attitude
of Christians.
Nestorianism1 expresses our tendency to see in the person of Jesus Christ a human
existence in his essence or nature, to see just simply a man, an individual instantiation of
human nature, though endowed by God with special gifts and extraordinary abilities. This
tendency survives very widely in that large number of people who speak with respect about
Christ, but who recognize in his person merely a great moral teacher, a very important man
who founded what is qualitatively the highest religion so far, or a social reformer who led
humanity to important ethical accomplishments.

1
Founded by Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople (380-451).
Correspondingly, monophysitism2 expresses our tendency to see in the person of Jesus
Christ only an intervention of God in history, to see just simply the God who seemingly
appears as a man, who is, that is, a “shadow” of a man and not man in his nature or
essence. And this tendency survives in those people who want to maintain within Christianity
a form of philosophical and ethical dualism, to maintain, that is, the unbridgeable polarization
which accommodates itself so well to human thought between the divine and the human, the
spiritual and the material, the eternal and the temporal, the sacred and the profane.
It is characteristic that from his view-point, the psychiatrist Igor Caruso (to whom we referred
in the previous chapter) sees revealed in these two heresies two more general tendencies or
propensities of human psychology. Each of these, if it is absolutized, leads to that heretical
image of life which we call neurosis. Caruso recognizes the historical offspring of such
neurotic tendencies in many expressions of an absolutized anthropocentrism or an equally
absolutized idealistic interpretation of life and of truth. In fact we can discern a clear
nestorianism in the optimism of rationalism, in the “efficiency” of moralism, in the
overvaluation of historical criticism, in the mythologizing of human science, in the
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scientific demythologizing of metaphysics, in the absolutization of politics and organization,
in the priority of economic and productive relationships. And we can see the monophysite
reaction expressed in puritan idealism, in contempt for the physical man, in distrust for the
body and its functions, in the fear of eros and sexual life, in the “de-spiritualization” of
structures, in the mythologization of visible authority, in the mysticism of infallible leadership.
Given, then, these antithetical tendencies of human psychology, the language of the Church
seeks to fix the boundaries of the truth of her experience of God’s incarnation, His
incarnation in the historical person of Jesus Christ. In the Third, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh
Ecumenical Councils, over four full centuries, the Church struggled to save the truth of the
incarnation of God from its falsification by an intellectual schema and axiomatic “principle”.
The “Christ” of the heresies was an ethical example of a perfect man or an abstract idea of a
fleshless God. In neither case is the life of men changed in any essential respect, the living
body of man remains condemned to dissolve in the ground and the individual or collective
“improvements” of human life are a farce, an absurdity, or bare deception.
The Church did not struggle for four full centuries over an abstract metaphysic or to
safeguard an ethical example. She did not even struggle for the “soul” of man; she wrestled
to save his body. Can the body of man, the flesh and not only the soul, be united with God
“without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation”?3 Can human
nature constitute a single event of life together with the divine nature? If yes, then death
does not exist. Then, the body is sown in the ground like wheat in order to bear fruit a
hundred times over and man can realize the fulness of life.

2
Founded by Eutyches, a priest in Constantinople (378-454).
3
From the Chalcedonian Definition, the statement of the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 451 A.D. held in the city
of Chalcedon.— tr.
She wrestled for four centuries to save the body of man from the absurdity of death, and to
declare that the humble stuff of the world, the flesh of the earth and of man, has the
possibility of being united with the divine life and the
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corruptible to be clothed in incorruptibility. It was a struggle and a contest so that our
conventional everyday language would be able to signify the dynamics of life revealed by the
flesh of the Word. Along with language there are the exercise of the artist to speak the same
truth with a brush, not figuratively or symbolically, but impressing on the drawing and in the
colour the rendering incorruptible and the glory of human flesh; and the artistic song of the
architect who d6rationalizes” stone and clay and in whose building what cannot be contained
is contained, the fleshless is made flesh, and the whole creation and the beauty of creation
is justified; and the hymn of the poet and the melody of the composer, an art which
subordinates the feelings instead of being subordinated to them, revealing in this submission
the secret of life which conquers death.

b. Self-emptying
To the opposition of the Greeks to the possibility of two different natures or essences being
united in one single existence, the theology of the Fathers and of the Ecumenical Councils
answers: This possibility exists in regard to God and man since both divinity and the
humanity have a common mode of existence, the person. We have seen in the preceding
that personal otherness and freedom from every natural predetermination, in accordance
with the experience of the Church, is God’s mode of existence: the Person precedes the
Essence; it hypostasizes the Essence; it makes it to be an hypostasis, a concrete existence.
And the image of this divine mode of existence has been imprinted on human nature. Even if
it is created and given, even human nature exists only as a personal otherness and a
potential for freedom from its createdness— from every natural predetermination. Man was
formed not only “in the image”, but also “in the likeness” of God (Gen 1.26): His personal
existence constitutes the possibility of man’s attaining at some time the freedom of life which
characterizes God himself, that is, eternal life which is not bound by natural limitations. The
first Adam refused to realize this potential. God, then, intervened, not in order to
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compel man to be like Him, but in order to be himself like man, by guiding the personal
potential of human nature to the extreme accomplishment of hypostatic union with Divinity—
an accomplishment unattainable even for man before the fall.
But God did not unite himself with man straight away in that situation where the potential
ending of the journey toward his likeness with God could guide Adam. The historical person
of Jesus Christ is a human particular like all the particulars after the fall— a separate
particular, limited and conformed in everything to the measure of the createdness of human
nature and the limitations of nature. Only in some very few moments, on Mt Tabor, did Christ
reveal the real consequence of the union of God with man— the transfiguration of man into
“glory”, a manifestation of God. In all the rest of Christ’s life on earth, the existential
manifestation of the life of God is “in restraint”. The Church speaks of an “emptying” of God
in the person of Christ, of a willing “voiding” or renunciation of every element directly
revelatory of his divinity: “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming
conformed in the body to our humility” (Phil 2.7; 3.21).
This “emptying” of divinity in the person of Christ is a fruit of divine personal freedom, of the
freedom of the incarnate Son and Word of God. It does not alter, nor does it affect the real
union of the divine and human natures of Christ. Free from every predetermination of
Essence or Nature, God can hypostasize in his Person not only his own Being (his Essence
or Nature), but also the being of man. And by hypostasizing simultaneously the two natures
in one personal hypostasis, he preserves the natural properties of each one, without being
subjected to any necessity for the existential realization of these properties: Therefore he
can “suppress or empty” the “glory” of his Divinity, as he can raise the weight of his material
humanity when he walks on the waters of the lake. If the Person alone is that which
hypostasizes Being, then no necessity of nature (divine or human) precedes in order to limit
the existential manifestation of personal freedom.
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c. “Without confusion” and “without division”

God assumes human nature and makes it a participant in his own divine Nature by
hypostasizing the common personal mode of existence of the two natures in a single
existence, in one person. This one person is the incarnate Word, the second Person of the
Holy Trinity “in flesh”, the only Son of the Father “become flesh”. He is Jesus, the Christ of
God.
The union of the two natures in Christ is without confusion and without division. The two
natures are not confused; the difference between the two natures is, not eliminated. The
Divinity and the humanity each retain their own properties in one undivided existential
realization, in the one person of Christ. The Church confesses Christ as perfect God and
perfect man— there is no distortion or diminution or falsification either of his human or of his
divine being.
But all these formulas are in danger of being understood as abstract concepts, if we ignore
the mode by which the person hypostasizes nature (causes it to be a real existence) and,
consequently, the union of natures. We must not forget that nature exists only as a personal
hypostasis, only “in persons’ . And the person hypostasizes nature, since it summarizes in a
single existential event, in the event of its own otherness and freedom, all the energies of its
nature: volitional, rational, creative, loving and every other energy. We know nature only as
an event which has been given effect, only by means of its energies which are carried and
expressed existentially by the person. Nature without energies is only an abstract concept,
an insubstantial intelligible “being”. Like the person without a nature (whose energies it
hypostasizes existentially), it is merely an abstract “principle”.
The danger that we might understand the union of the two natures in Christ as an abstract
theoretical “principle” by reference to “beings” which are simply intelligible and unrelated to
any existential realization has been noted by the Church in the case of the heresies known
as monotheletism and monenergism.4 This heresy accepts that Christ has two natures,
divine and human, but maintains that the union of the two
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natures results in one personal will and energy of the incarnate God the Word.
But only one will means only one nature, because a second nature which is not given effect
as an existential event is in fact non-existent. If Christ had only a divine will and energy, then
his human nature is in fact insubstantial; he was himself an existentially inexplicable
semblance of man and humanity remained unassumed by the Divinity and unhealed.
For the Church Christ is the person of the incarnate God the word, a person who
hypostasizes in a particular existential event both the divine and the human natures. The
particular existential event is his personal otherness and freedom which summarizes and
manifests the energies of the two natures. The person has priority over the nature (it gives
existence and hypostasis to the nature). Personal difference and freedom summarize and
manifest the natural energies without being subordinated to them. Thus, Christ’s personal
freedom is not subordinated to the energies of the two natures, but subordinates them and
therefore orders them and reveals “his human will following and not resisting or opposing,
but rather submitting to his divine and all-powerful will”.5
Consequently, the precedence of the divine will in Christ is not a natural necessity; it is not
that the divine will is imposed on the human by the force of its natural omnipotence. But this
precedence is an accomplishment of Christ’s personal freedom and, therefore, the Church
proposes it in opposition to the use of freedom which the first Adam made. The first Adam
refused to realize life (the personal existence of his nature) in the way of life, as a
communion of love and erotic self-transcendence. His personal freedom (a manifestation
and management of the natural energies which make up the event of existence) turned the
volitional energy of his nature from the way of life to the way of death: He distorted life into
individual survival, into an autonomous natural self-existence. And nature, existentially
autonomous, is given effect as a necessity of life for its own sake, as an instinctive will for
survival, for dominance, for perpetuation. Nature is made
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autonomous by the personal possibility of life. The natural energies are untied from the
freedom of the person (their personal management and expression); they become an
existential purpose in themselves, a relentless necessity. Personal existence is given effect
subordinate to nature and so to its createdness and, therefore, it results in death— the last
natural necessity of the created.
In contrast, the second Adam, Christ, by his personal freedom subordinates the will of his
human nature to the will of his divine nature, to the will of real life which is effected as a
communion of obedience to the Father, as a self-surrender to His love. The will of Christ’s
divine nature is the common will of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, the will of life, the
freedom of love— a freedom from every necessity and, therefore, synonymous with eternal

4
Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople (610-638), was the chief representative.
5
St Gregory Nazianzen, Theological Orations, IV, § 12.
life. To this will of freedom which realizes life as self-transcendence and subordination of
love, Christ subordinates his natural human will, and with this subordination he brings about
healing, the cure of human nature. Human nature is no longer an autonomous necessity of
self-preservation; it is not the attempt at self existence by what has been created ending
inescapably in death. Now there exists a Person who sums up the energies of human nature
in the free realization of life; now human nature shares by means of the will of the Son in the
life of the Trinity. Its created character, its materiality, does not impede its hypostatic and
existential union with Divinity, since what makes up existence is not the nature in itself and
its energies (materiality or spirituality or immateriality), but the person who hypostasizes it.

d. Perfect God and perfect man

It is astonishing the attention the Church paid to the attempt to mark with exactness of
expression the limits of the event which was completed in Christ, so that the union of God
with man not be exhausted by that expression nor be supported by categories from
conventional logic. Rather, she wished that the formulation of this truth be safeguarded from
every misinterpretation which would alter man’s capacity to share in
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the immortalization of what is mortal being completed in the incarnation of the Word.
We speak, then, in principle of the incarnation of God in the person of Christ, of God’s
becoming man. “We say that God has become man, not that man has become God.”6 When
we refer to Christ, we do not define someone who is essentially a man to whom the Divinity
has been united; there is no preexistent human hypostasis to which God the Word has been
added. But God the Word “has framed” for himself living flesh “from the pure blood of the
virgin”, being himself the hypostasis which is made incarnate by this extraordinary
conception. The assumption of human nature by the Word followed the way in which nature
as an existential event is given effect: It has as a beginning the womb of a woman. There is
formed and grows the living flesh which reveals the hypostasis or the person.
We speak of the incarnation of the Son and Word of God, of the second Person of the Holy
Trinity. This does not mean that the Word acts independently of the other Persons and alone
effects the assumption of humanity. The Church recognizes in the event of the incarnation of
God the Word a common activity of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Not that either the Father
or the Spirit are in any way made incarnate with the Word. But while the distinction of the
divine Hypostases is not removed and only the Hypostasis of the Word assumes human
flesh, still the will and activity of the Trinity remains common to them even with respect to the
incarnation— the uniqueness of God is preserved, the unity of ‘divine life. This single totality
of life and will and activity of the Divinity is summed up by Christ in his divine-human
hypostasis: “for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2.9 RSV).
We confess Christ to be perfect God, but also perfect man. The whole Divinity is united in
his person with the whole humanity. Every property and every energy of the entire human
nature has been assumed by Christ, nothing human has remained outside of this
assumption. The initiative for the

6
St John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, 111, 47.
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assumption is, however, in the one who assumes, who acts singly in respect of his
hypostasis and triadicly in respect of will and grace. But what is assumed is not a passive
factor in the assumption. God in becoming incarnate does not compel human nature, he
does not use nature as a neutral material for realizing his will. Human nature is offered to be
assumed by God by a free personal consent— the nature is offered entirely and its
self-offering is effected uniquely (since nature exists and is expressed only personally): It is
the consent of the Virgin Mary, the free acceptance on her part of the will of God, which
makes possible the meeting of the divine will with the human in the event of the incarnation
of the Son and Word. “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to
your word” (Lk 1.38 RSV).
In these words is expressed a stance of self-surrender and self-offering, of acceptance of
the will of God, and of absolute trust in his love. No claim to autonomy, no demand for
self-protection. Mary offers herself for this conception and pregnancy only out of obedience
to God; she disposes her existence in order that his will be done. And so the conception
which is accomplished is free from any natural intentionality, free from every necessity and
bondage to desire, lust, pleasure, from every instinct of reproduction and perpetuation. The
natural energy of motherhood is transformed from an independent biological function into a
personal event of free consent, of obedience to God, abandonment to his j providence. And
it is precisely freedom from natural necessity which shows Mary “even after giving birth to be
Virgin”.
We say in the language of the Church that the union of God with man, the incarnation of God
the Word is an event “transcending nature”. This means in principle: an event of reciprocal
freedom (of God and of man) from every natural predetermination. In the person of the
Blessed Virgin and Mother of God “the limits of nature have been defeated”, the
presuppositions and necessities which dominate the created in its autonomy are removed by
the uncreated. But the Uncreated, in his incarnation from the Virgin, also transcends the
mode of the uncreated and begins to exist in the mode of the created; he who is outside of
time enters time and he who is
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uncontainable is contained and he who is before all ages is an infant and the impalpable
assumes the dimension of individuality. For humanity to transcend nature is to be released
from the limitations of createdness and the necessities of fallen autonomy. And for Divinity to
transcend nature is freedom even from the freedom of unlimited transcendence of every
predetermination or need— the event that transcends nature is that God “has come up to
nature, that is, he has arrived at that which is less worthy and which he did not possess”.7
From this double transcendence the only absolute existential event for the Church is
revealed and that is the Person of God and his image imprinted on the personal existence of
man.

7
Maximus Confessor, Scholia on the Divine Names, P.G. 4, 229C.
e. Theotokos
The Church recognizes in the person of the Blessed Theotokos that creature who— alone
within all God’s creation, material and spiritual— attained to the fulness of purpose for which
the creation exists, to the fullest possible unity with God, to the fullest realization of the
possibilities of life. Her consent to the incarnation of the Son was not only a harmonizing of
the human will with the will of God, but a unique existential event of co-inherence of the life
of the created and the life of the uncreated: our Lady was counted worthy to share by her
natural energy (the energy of will, but also of motherhood) in the common activity of the
Divinity, that is in the very life of God. Her physical life, her blood, the biological functioning
of her body, was identified with the life given effect in the incarnate hypostasis of God the
Word. God the Word lived hypostatically as a part of her body; God lived within her womb
with her own flesh and blood; her own natural created energy was identified with the energy
of the life of the uncreated.
The Theotokos did not simply “lend” her biological functions to God the Word, because a
mother does not “lend” her body to her child, but she builds up his existence with her flesh
and her blood just as she forms the “soul” of her child with her
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nursing, speech, caressing, affection. The Church insists that the Son and Word of God did
not simply assume flesh in his incarnation, but a “flesh animated by a reasonable and
spiritual soul”,8 just as is the flesh of every human fetus. Christ assumed human nature with
the whole of the energies of body and soul which go to make it up and express it. And the
symbol of the Theotokos does not stop at constructing the flesh of Christ, but extends even
to what we could call formation of his soul, of his human psychology, since the mother is the
source and ground for the articulation of the first mental experiences, of the first awareness,
of the first baby-talk, of the progressive entry of the child into the world of names and
symbols, the world of people.
To be Mother of God, then, the Virgin Mary identified in her existence the life of the created
with the life of the uncreated; she united in her own life the creation with its creator. And so
every creature, the entire creation of God, ,finds in her person the gate of “true life”, the
entrance to the fulness of the existential possibilities. “In her all creation rejoices, the
company of angels and the race of men”. In the language of the Church’s poetry, every
image which includes nature is ascribed to our Lady, in order to exhibit exactly the entire
renewal of the created which was accomplished in her person. She is “heaven” and “fertile
earth” and “unhewn mountain” and “rock giving drink to those who thirst for life” and
“flourishing womb” and “field bringing forth atonement”. And the inimitable “semantics” of
orthodox iconography translates the figurative statement of these images at one time in
outline and at another in colour. It represents the Theotokos and throne of divinity, either as
holding a child or praying, or sweetly kissing the Child, or “reclining” at the Nativity of Christ
or at her own falling asleep. She is the new Eve who recapitulates nature, not in that
autonomy contrary to nature and in death, but in that participation in the Divinity which

8
St John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, 111, 46.
transcends nature and in the realization of eternal life. Because her own will restores the
existential “end” and purpose of creation generally, she gives meaning and hope to
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the “eager longing of creation”. When the faithful seek the intercession of the Theotokos for
their salvation, they are not seeking some kind of Juridical mediation, but that their own
ineffective will be contained within her own life-giving will, her will which affirms the saving
love of the incarnate God.

f. Historical co-ordinates
In assuming human nature, God intervenes in time and places himself in human history.
Jesus Christ is an historical person: He is born in a specific time and place, from a mother
whose genealogical tree is rooted in and branches from a specific tribe of Israel, the royal
family of David. And so he himself is a Hebrew by race, placed in the social conventions of
the hellenized world of the Roman empire, subordinate to the ruling political structures in the
land of the Hebrews occupied by the Romans.
His own name is a composite of the two languages and traditions which form the historical
co-ordinates of his time period and will form the historical flesh of the first Church: Jesus is a
Hebrew name, Christ is a Greek word. With “Jesus” we hellenize the Hebrew “Jeshua”,
derived from a verbal root which means “I save”, “I help”. And the word “Christ” is an
adjective used as a noun derived from the Greek verb for “I anoint” and means the “one who
has been anointed”, he who has received “anointing”. In the Hebrew tradition, anointing with
oil or myrrh was the visible sign of elevation to the rank of king or priest, a sign that the one
anointed was chosen by God to serve the unity of the people or the relationship of the
people with the Lord of Hosts. But the special Christ of God was, within the Scriptures, the
expected Messiah and therefore the word “Christ” had become identified conceptually with
the word “Messiah”. Combining the proper name “Jesus” with the title of rank “Christ”, the
Church indicated the historical person and interpreted the fact which he incarnated.
Luke the Evangelist gives us the chronological reference points for the appearance of John
the Baptist’s preaching and consequently of the beginning of Christ’s public life. He specifies
the year which the Roman emperor is completing on
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the throne: “in the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar”. This historical “mark” would
be enough for a very exact chronological determination. But Luke persists with the
scholasticism of an expert historian and so provides possible controversies about the
historicity of Jesus. He states the chronology with reference to the local governors: “Pontius
Pilate being governor of Judaea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, Philip his brother tetrarch
of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lusanius being tetrarch of Abilene”. The political rulers are not
enough, but he adds as well the chr3nological definition afforded by the terms of office of the
religious rulers of Israel: “while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests” (Lk 3.1-2).
Luke’s sensitivity to exact chronology would be justified many centuries later when the wave
of atheism in Europe after the “Renaissance” tried to prove the person of Christ to be
mythical and unsubstantial, thereby giving an easy solution to the evaluation of his
divine-human hypostasis against the “foolishness” and “scandal”. Successive generations of
investigators in the last centuries have engaged in an extensive and many sided inquiry into
the historical credibility of the Gospels: Chronologies, references to persons, officials of the
period, places, occurrence of events, came under the scrutiny of philology and historical
criticism of the texts. Their verification was sought in the discoveries of the archeological
spade. Christian apologetics cited a series of extra-Christian references to the person of
Christ which appeared to confirm his intervention in history: Pliny the Younger (c. 112 A.D.),
Tacitus (c. 115), Suetonius (c. 120), but also earlier references like the famous testimonium
of Flavius Josephus (c. 93), the chronicle of the Samaritan, Thallus, written in Rome (a little
before or a little after 60), the letter of the Syrian Mara Bar Sarapion (73 A.D.). By various
routes, scientific investigation has verified the historicity of the person of Jesus Christ
-without interpreting the fact which this Person made incarnate.
In the second “line of defence”, western rationalism of the last centuries has invoked the
“mythologizing” of the historical person of Christ by the first Christian community. The
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“logic” of this interpretation was not trivial. We draw almost the whole of our information
about the historical person of Jesus Christ from the texts which the first Christian community
wrote for itself -Gospels, Acts, Letters of the Apostles. But this information expresses
exclusively the idealized proclamation of the person of Christ, his identification with the
messianic expectations, the religious pursuits, the missionary intentions of the first Christian
community. There must exist, consequently, a difference and distance between the
“historical Jesus” and the “Christ of the apostolic proclamation” which the Gospels preserve.
In order for us to transcend this distance and to re-establish the historical truth about the
person of Jesus, we must cleanse the gospel texts of the probable elements of “idealization”
and keep only that information which can be proved historically indisputable. Of course, the
problem which arises is: With what criteria will the “cleansing” of the gospel texts be
undertaken and how far will it extend? To confront this question in practice has resulted in
the creation of a variety of schools, tendencies and methods of interpretation, especially in
the Protestant world, where each one confronts a different range of questions about the
gospel narrative, arriving sometimes at the entire denial of the “supernatural” element, of the
miracles and of the Resurrection of Christ.
All this speculation is, however, a consequence of a particular understanding of knowledge
which especially characterizes western-european man and, by extension, the type of man
which the western way of life forms. We have spoken in earlier pages about this demand for
“positive” knowledge, the search for certainties which every human understanding can
possess with assurance, without the uncertainty of controversies. It assumes an
individualistic attitude to life, an attitude of individual security, assured self-sufficiency, a
culture of the rights of the individual”— that is, a way of life at the extreme opposite of the
ecclesial mode of existence. Of course, in preceding pages again, we have noted that the
conclusions of the “Positive” sciences as they are called (both physics and historical and
anthropological investigations) tend today to a theory of knowledge which proves that
“positive”, objective
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and definite knowledge is unattainable. But it is difficult to restrain by theoretical efforts
western man’s demand to master knowledge individually and to exhaust it within the limits of
his subjective capacities for knowledge. It is difficult because this demand constitutes a fruit
of a general attitude and way of life. In contrast to the ecclesial realization of life (life as a
dynamic achievement of loving self-transcendence and loving communion) it is literally an
heretical understanding of what it is to live and to be true.
However, within these same limits of western theology, many interpreters have proved the
historical value of the gospel narratives and the groundlessness of the separation of the
“historical Jesus” from the “Christ of the apostolic preaching” with thoroughness as well as
with rational arguments. For someone of the western type and attitude, this apologetic
assurance of the value of the Gospels has, without anything else, a paedagogical usefulness
and can strengthen “weak consciences”. But the strengthening of “weak consciences” by
apologetics has a clear and very definite limit: It can prove that the Gospels do not narrate
myths, but real events certified by evidence verified many times over. Apologetics cannot,
though, interpret the events of the gospel narratives, to bring to light the causes and the
purpose of these incidents. No apologetic can certify the divine-humanity of Christ, the
victory over death and the renewal of the created which was realized in the historic person of
Jesus. And without the foundation of the truth of the incarnation of God and the deification of
man, the gospel teaching stays an admirable, but finally utilitarian moralization, and the
references to the miracles of Christ represent only an essentially uninterpreted supernatural
“paradox”.

g. “Source” and “sources”

In radically disputing the objectified “authority” of the papacy, Protestantism proposed the
Bible as the exclusive source of Christian truth. The Bible contains the complete truth of the
revelation of God in an objective and definitive way. It is a text which makes the word of God
directly accessible to us as
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an objective given without our needing supplements to revelation or intermediaries for faith
and the reception of the divine word.
The Roman Catholic “counter-Reformation” objected to this absolutization of the authority of
the Bible by Protestantism, proposing that there are two sources of Christian truth: the Holy
Scripture and the Sacred Tradition. The “college of bishops” expresses and administers the
Sacred Tradition, but only by means of its “infallible” head, the Pope of Rome, who is defined
as the “visible head of the whole Church” (visibile caput totius Ecclesiae). By his sanction,
the ecclesial Tradition acquires genuine authority. All those ways by which the revelation of
God is formulated and interpreted constitute this Tradition: Ecumenical Councils, opinions of
the Fathers, liturgical practice, creeds, rules of life.
Whether the Scripture alone or the Scripture together with the Tradition, it is still a matter of
the source or the sources by which the individual derives the truth “from the object”; it is a
matter, that is, of the need for objective authority, the need of western man to be assured
individually that he possesses an indisputable truth— even if this assurance is achieved by
his submission to an idolized schematization of the “infallible”, to the authority of
supernatural revelation, or to the authority of science, to the divine inspiration of the texts of
Scripture or, later, of the texts of Marx or any other ideology, to the “infallibility” of the Vatican
or to the “infallibility” of Moscow or any other “see”. The history of western man is a dialectic
of submission and rebellion, where rebellion means in each case the choice of a different
authority, consequently of a new submission, while the goal remains always the same—
individual security, the protection of individual certainty about the truth to be believed.
Aside from the blood which was spilled (by the “holy wars”, the “Holy Inquisition”, the tortures
which were established as an “investigative method in the trials of heretics”), enough ink was
spilled to defend the authority of the Vatican, the “infallibility” of the Pope. Blatant forgeries of
history were enlisted: that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome, that he exercised a primacy of
power over the other
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Apostles and subsequently bestowed this power to his successor Bishops of Rome, that
Constantine the Great assigned the government of the western Roman state to the Pope
with imperial rights (“pseudo-Donation of Constantine”), that very ancient canons treated the
Pope as the supreme head of ecclesiastical— and also of political— power
(“pseudo-Isidorean Decretals”), that Cyprian already in the 3rd century preached the papal
primacy (“pseudo-Cyprian writings”) and many others. But ample ink has been spent as well
by Protestants to defend the inspiration of Scripture, the immediate revelation of God within
the biblical text alone. It has been maintained that the writers of the Bible were simply
passive instruments without their affecting the writing, even by influencing the style or
punctuation of the texts; they merely lent their hand writing mechanically what the Holy Spirit
dictated to them. And this because only such a rational inspiration could assure
supernaturally and without contradiction the infallible authority of the texts and give to the
faithful the certainty that the Bible could possess the truth.
Within such a climate, scientific dispute about the historical credibility of the Scriptures or the
supports for the Tradition took away the foundation of “faith”, that is, of submission to
authority. Western man had to choose between atheism and the emasculation of his reason,
or to accept compromise with a censored version of the gospel narrative, stripped of every
“supernatural” element, suitable only for morally uplifting use, or even for political
exploitation.
The life and practice of the undivided Church, like its historical extension in the theology and
spirituality of the Orthodox Churches, knew neither one nor two sources of infallible
authority. This does not mean that it disregarded or underestimated the meaning and the
authority of the Holy Scripture and the Sacred Tradition. But it refused to separate truth from
the realization and experience of the truth, the realization of life “in truth”. Before any
formulation, the truth is an event: the historical realization of the triadic mode of “real life”. It
is the body of Christ, the Church. The event of life which is the Church precedes both
Scripture and Tradition— as his divine-human hypostasis precedes the teaching of
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Christ, and without this hypostasis of life the gospel word remains, perhaps, a wonderful
teaching, but unable to save the human race from death.
Scripture and Tradition define the truth and revelation of God to people without exhausting
them. The words “truth” and “revelation” do not mean for the Church some “supplement” to
our knowledge unattainable by our scientific or other reasonable method; they are not some
“articles of faith” which we must accept without contradiction because they have been given
to us in a “supernatural” way, such that no one would dare to dispute them. For the Church,
truth and revelation refer to God who reveals himself to people as “real life”. And life cannot
be revealed with concepts “about” life, but only as an existential realization accessible to
man. God’s mode of being incarnate in an historical person— in the Person of Christ who
realizes life free from death— is the truth and revelation of life. Christ is “the way and the
truth and the life” (Jn 14.6) and remains “yesterday and today the same” (Heb 13.8) as the
way and mode of existence of his body, the Church.
We know, consequently, the truth and revelation not simply by reading the Holy Scripture
and the “credal” texts of the Tradition, but we verify these texts with our participation in the
Church’s mode of existence, in the way of the triadic prototype of life. We transform our
individual approach to the texts into an ecclesial communion of the truth which the texts
mark out. Outside of this communion, the ecclesial mode of existence, there exists neither
truth nor revelation, but only some religious knowledge better or worse than other analogous
knowledge. In order for us to know the word of the Holy Scripture, we must study it incarnate
in the ecclesial Body of Christ, in the persons of the saints, of our spiritual fathers who “give
us birth” into the life of the ecclesial communion.
The reading of the Holy Scripture in the undivided Church and afterwards in the Orthodox
Church constitutes an act of worship: that is, an act of communion of the ecclesial body. We
communicate with the word of the Apostles who became 11 witnesses” and “observers” of
the “manifestation” of God (they heard and saw and handled his historical revelation), we
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communicate with them by reading their texts, not as historical information, but accepting
their testimony as a confirmation of life and unity of the eucharistic body. Every eucharistic
gathering is also a revelation in practice of the gospel word; it is the realization of the life of
people, living and dead, according to the model of the triadic unity, beyond corruption and
death. This is the Gospel, which we celebrate every time in the Eucharist by accepting the
reading of the word of the Apostles as confirmation of our direct experience there.
The gospel word of the Apostles is a word and revelation of Christ, not because Christ
dictated it to them by some form of mechanical “inspiration”, but because the Apostles wrote
down the relationship of life which they realized with Him, the same relationship of life which
constitutes the eucharistic body in unity. They wrote down the word and revelation of this
relationship which means as much the events or “signs” which reveal the mode of existence
which this union renews as the didactic indication of the limits and presuppositions of God’s
union with man.
When the Church in the Eucharist lives the miracle of life freed from every natural necessity,
then the miracles of Christ which the gospel narrative recounts are nothing but particular
manifestations and details of this miracle itself. If the initial miracle is true— if the created
can exist in the mode of the uncreated— then no other miracle is impossible, then “ the limits
of nature are conquered”, the limitations and necessities which govern the created are lifted.
Then “the blind see again, the. lame walk, lepers are cleansed, deaf hear, the dead are
raised” (Lk 7.22). For the Church, the gospel narratives of the miracles of Christ were never
apologetic proofs which coerce reason and demand faith in the divine-humanity of Christ.
But they were “signs”, signs which point to that event which the Church experiences every
time “in the breaking of the bread”: Life becomes imperishable and the mortal immortal in a
manner “most becoming of God”.
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h. Willing death
Christ unites in his Person the divine and human natures. As God, he is the one “incarnate
for us”. As man, he is the one who “has died and risen”. The incarnation of God without the
resurrection of man, the removal of death, would be a defective truth, a theophany rather
indifferent to man— unrelated in any way with the existential adventure of every man, his life
and death.
The Church experiences the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ as a way and
manner which every man assumes who participates in the divine life, immortality and
incorruptibility. We speak of a “way” and “manner” and we must try to say, even in the
conventional concepts of our everyday language, what we mean.
The death of Christ was a willing death— “he gave himself up” (Eph 5.25). His death was not
the unavoidable termination of the created nature, which the existential event tends to bring
about with only its own functions, and which is led gradually to the weakening and to the
final extinction of its psychosomatic activities. Christ gave himself up to death forsaking
totally every tendency and aspiration for physical self-existence of the created and
transposed the event of existence and life into a relationship with the Father, into his
abandonment to the will of the Father, into the surrender of his “spirit” “into the hands” of the
Father.
We die because after the fall it is our created nature which gives existence to our hypostasis
or ego; we draw existence from the possibilities or energies of our nature which are not able
by themselves to sustain self-existence and the principle of life, because they wear out and
end at some point. But the hypostasis of Christ draws existence and life not from the human
and created, but from his divine and uncreated nature, which exists as the freedom of the
Father’s will and the response of the Son’s love to this will. The birth even of Christ’s bodily
individuality is not a result of the autonomous impulse for perpetuation of the created
nature— “not from blood, nor from the will of the flesh, nor from the will of a
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husband, but he is born from God” (cf, Jn 1.13). Consequently his supernatural birth, by the
standard of the created, alone was sufficient to assure the freedom of Christ’s flesh from
corruption and death.
But the will of God’s love was to transform the necessity of death, which the fall imposed on
human nature in general, also into the general possibility of incorruptibility and immortality.
Therefore Christ accepts even death willingly, and so he places the final conclusion of man’s
rebellion within the freedom of love and obedience to the Father’s will, that is, within the
mode of existence of the uncreated. Hereafter everyone can transform the necessity of
death into a freedom of self-renunciation from every demand of self-existence; everyone can
repeat the movement of Christ, a movement opposite to Adam’s rebellion and repose the
possibility of existence no longer in mortal nature, but in the personal relationship with the
Father. In the person of Christ, human nature is granted the same relationship of life with
God which the Son has with the Father— and this is the meaning of the “adoption” on which
Paul insists (Eph 1.5; Gal 4.5). Now, from the willing “destruction” of life “we save” life (Mt
16.25), “dying with” Christ “we live together with” him (2 Tim 2.11) forever. This is the
meaning of the “discipline” which the Church defines as an imitation of the cross of Christ,
this is the testimony of the martyrs who remain
examples” for the Church and give significance to its discipline: Life is not biological survival,
but a relationship with God, the denial of the demands for life in itself, the realization of
existence as a loving communion.
None of this means that for Christ death was exempt from the pain and horror which every
human creature has at the uncoupling of this hypostasis from the way in which nature gives
effect existentially to this hypostasis. Christ did not simply die, but summarized in his death
all the tragedy which can be heaped up by man’s sin, the existential failure and missing the
mark of his nature: His fellow people repaid him hatred and death, they who received from
him only love and kindness. They killed him with violence and degradation, in the way in
which criminals were executed, those who are
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especially unsuccessful in human society. They put him up between two robbers, like a
criminal himself He died with the martyr death of the cross— a death of extreme pain when
the body, no longer tolerating to be supported on the wounds of the nails in order to raise the
chest and to draw breath, surrenders to suffocation and choking. “And through all these
things he showed his love for us.”

i. “Ransom” and “redemption”

The loving self-offering of Christ is a “ransom” for the redemption” of every human death.
Already in the time of the first apostolic community, the Church tried to say and to describe
the experience of salvation which Christ’s death on the cross had given us. It used the
inevitable images and categories of our everyday life, even though our everyday life is
subject to the fall. And so in order for us to understand what the Church wants to indicate by
means of these images from our fallen experience, we must purify them as much as we can
of every individualistic, rationalistic, or utilitarian interpretation, that is from every element
that holds life back.
We speak of “adoption”, of “reconciliation”, of “ransom”, of “redemption”, of “justification”. In
our everyday life, these images function subject more to the mentality of relationships of
transactions, of individual restoration, of subjective security. But the Church with these same
concepts intends to indicate the sacrificial love of God for man, the restoration of the created
to the life-giving relationship with the uncreated, the renunciation of the existential autonomy
of the individual, the drawing of life from loving communion. How we are to construe these
images is, then, an important question: will it be with meaning they have in the fallen
condition or with the meaning they have in the ecclesial perspective?
A great misconception and distortion of the ecclesial truth about the abolition of death by the
Cross of Christ had already appeared in the West by the first centuries and progressively
dominated the spiritual climate. Tertullian, Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas are the
great landmarks in the
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formation and imposition of this distortion which was finally proclaimed as an official teaching
of the western Church at the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It is a matter of a legalistic
interpretation of the biblical images of “ransom” which Christ paid with his death on the cross
seeing that “he redeemed” humanity from slavery and subjection to sin and death— an
interpretation adapted to the violent experience of man after the fall.
According to this interpretation, man’s sin is a disturbance and violation of the divine “order
of justice” and at the same time an offense to the honour and majesty of God. The degree of
guilt for this disturbance and offense is measured in proportion to the degree of importance
of the one who has been offended— as in human justice. Then the infinite majesty and
justice of God demanded an infinite substitute for propitiation. But finite man could not offer
such an infinite substitute, even if the whole of humanity were sacrificed to satisfy the divine
justice. Therefore, God himself undertook to pay, in the person of his Son, the infinite
ransom for the satisfaction of his justice. Christ was punished with the death on the cross in
place of sinful humanity and in order that sinful humanity receive expiation. In the teaching of
Luther and of Calvin later, it is not simply divine justice, but the wrath of God which must be
appeased by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
The changes which this theory occasioned in the faith of the Church is literally incalculable.
It changed the truth of God by subordinating the freedom of his love to the relentless
necessity of an egocentric and savage justice which demanded sadistic satisfaction. The
God of the Church, from being a Father and “passionate lover” of mankind, was transformed
into an implacable judge and menacing avenger whose justice rejoices (according to the
view of Augustine) when it sees the sinners who are being tormented in hell.
The successive waves of atheism in the spiritual life of the West in these last centuries, the
repeated outbreaks of liberation from the “sadistic God” of the Roman juridical tradition, is
not a phenomenon unrelated to this theory of the “satisfaction of divine justice by Christ’s
death on a cross”, just as the
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joining of Christian truth to the conscience by an unsurpassed weaving of guilt is not
unrelated. This theory changes the ecclesial notion of sin as missing the mark and a failure
of mankind; it accepts it as a legal transgression and punishable deviation. It is a cause of
egocentric guilt and a ground of egocentric justification as well, because the psychic
mechanisms of mankind after the fall still need guilt and often provoke it, seeing that by
means of an objective and indisputable “redemption” they achieve the egocentric satisfaction
of individual “justification”. The schema “guilt— redemption— justification” is a typical
symptom of every “natural religion”, an expression of human psychology which refuses to
give up the individualistic version of existence and seeks to defeat death by its own
meritorious accomplishments, even strengthened by the exchange value of some
transcendent “ransom”.
Thus the Church is transformed into a moralistic religion, serving the individual
self-assurance of mankind. The Cross of Christ ceases to incarnate and to reveal the core of
the gospel of salvation: The renunciation of life in itself, in order that life be achieved, the
acceptance of death if the last existential resistance of individuality is to yield and existence
is to be drawn not from the created nature, but from the personal relationship with God the
Father, the giver of life.
If the Cross of Christ became the symbol par excellence of the Church, a sensible
expression and manifestation of the faith of Christians, it was not simply in order to recall the
passion of the God-man and the price which was paid to the enraged justice of God.
Christians impressed the sign of the cross on their bodies, revealing the willing
self-renunciation of individual self-sufficiency, the sacrificial offering of their life to the will of
the Father. “All visible things need a cross,” said St Maximus the Confessor, “and all
intelligible things need a tomb.“9 Everything that can be seen, everything which becomes
accessible to us by means of individual senses and every knowledge which we acquire by
our individual understanding, everything which seems to be subordinated to us
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thanks to our individual abilities, must be crucified and buried, be put to death as individual
certainties and a fortress of the ego, if they are to function as a loving relationship and self-
transcendence.
Therefore Christians sign their bodies with the sign of the cross, not only when they pray, but
“when they begin any deed whatever”;10 “over bread to be eaten, and over cups from which
to drink, on coming in and on going out... when going to bed and when rising again”.11 Every
phase and every turn of our everyday life is sealed with the mark of life-giving death, of
obedience to the will of the Father, the will of life, because the Cross is not a sign of
recollection and emotional or morally instructive reference, but a symbol and manifestation
of conformation to Christ’s mode of existence, the way of life. As such a symbol revealing
the life which constitutes the Church and the hope of the faithful, the cross is impressed
finally even on the tombs of those who have fallen asleep, affirming their entry into the “land
of the living”.

j. The Risen One

Christ rose again on the third day after his burial. Both the biblical testimonies and the
church’s later iconography and hymnology allude to the resurrection indirectly, one could
say, by means of signs like the empty tomb, the angel of God who freed the entrance of the
grave, the linen burial clothes “lying by themselves”. A particular moment when the dead
body of Christ received life again and began to function biologically again is neither specified
nor described as in the case of the dead whom Christ himself raised during the period of his
public life. But there is the experience and evidence of his bodily appearances after the
resurrection: The risen Christ appears to the myrrh-bearing women and to the travellers on
the road to Emmaus and to the gathering of the disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem or
on the shores of Lake Tiberias.

9
“Chapters on Knowledge”, §67 in Maximus Confessor. Selected Writings, tr. George C. Berthold (New York et
al., 1985). p. 140.
10
Origen, Commentary on Ezekiel, 9.4. P.G. 13, 801A.
11
St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 13.36.
For the experience and certainty of the Church, the resurrection of Christ differs from the
resurrections of the dead
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which he himself realized in his earthly life. To the dead body of Lazarus, or of the son of the
widow of Nain, or the daughter of Jairus, the sovereign command of Christ restores the dead
functions of life, just as in the cases of other miracles he restored certain specific functions,
the sight of the blind or the hearing and speech of the man deaf and dumb or walking to the
paralytic— but, the bodies of those raised remained corruptible and mortal. All of them died
again at some later time because their bodies which had once been raised were subject, as
they were before they were raised, to the consequences of the human fall, to the necessity
of corruption and death. The raisings of the dead which are described in the Holy Scripture
are, to the human eye, astonishing examples of the power of God, that is, of his freedom
from every natural limitation. This power can overturn the laws of nature but cannot change
the mode of existence of nature. Such a change cannot be imposed from without; it can only
be the fruit of personal freedom, an accomplishment of freedom. As we have often
emphasized in the previous pages, it is the person who hypostasizes life and existence, and
hypostasizes it either as a natural self-sufficiency (subordinating existence to the necessities
of the created) or as an event of loving relationship and erotic communion with God (freeing
existence from corruption and death). But love and eros are not imposed from without; they
are only an achievement of personal freedom.
This achievement of freedom is completed by Christ on the Cross and is manifest
existentially in his resurrection. By his obedience to the Father’s will even to the point of
death, Christ leads his human nature to the perfect renunciation of every demand for
existential self-sufficiency, transposing the existence of nature into the relationship of love
and freedom of obedience to God. And this nature which draws its existence from the
relationship with God does not die because, even though created, it exists now in the
manner of the uncreated, not in the manner of the created. Christ’s raised body is a material
body, a created nature. But it differs from the bodies of other raised people because it exists
now in the mode of the uncreated, the mode of freedom from every natural necessity’ And
so, while it is sensible and tangible, with flesh and bones
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(Lk 24.30), while it can take nourishment like all other bodies (and the risen Christ eats
honey and fish before the eyes of his disciples (Lk 24.42)) and while the marks of the
wounds which he received are obvious on him, still this same body enters the upper room
“with the doors locked” Un 20. 1) and vanishes at Emmaus after the breaking of the bread
(Lk 24.31) and finally is received into heaven (Mk 16.19; Lk 24.51) enthroning the human
“clay” in the glory of the divine life.
The transformation in the mode of existence of Christ’s human nature after his resurrection
is shown in the Gospels indirectly again: it is not possible to define and describe it with the
objective categories which determine our common everyday experiences. It notes an
“otherness”: he is the well-known “son of man”, but “in a different form” (Mk 16.12). Mary
Magdalene in the garden with his tomb in it thought him to be a gardener. The two travellers
on the road to Emmaus thought him a chance passer-by. The disciples who were fishing in
Lake Tiberias heard him asking them for something “good to eat” and did not suspect again
that it was he who was waiting for them on the shore. Everyone discovered him suddenly
and self-evidently, but after they had been mistaken at the beginning. What is it that made
him different in principle and which had to be transcended in order to recognize him?
Certainly something which is not to be said but only experienced. Perhaps if the relationship
with him stops at the apparent individual, it will not succeed in recognizing the hypostasis
freed from individual self-sufficiency. We do not know and we cannot describe the
experience; we can only dare to approach it interpretively from the events which accompany
it: The body of the risen Christ is the human nature free from every limitation and every
need. It is a human body with flesh and bones, but which does not draw life from its
biological functions, but is hypostasized in a real existence thanks to the personal
relationship with God which alone constitutes it and gives it life.
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k. The general resurrection

Christ “raised the Whole race of Adam when he rose from the grave” the whole race, every
one. The experiences of individualistic fallen life impede us from understanding this
existential relationship of one man with the whole humanity, of one person with the nature in
general: How is the entire human nature cut off from the possibility of life in the person of
Adam, and how in the person of Christ is the whole nature again “reconstituted” and given
life? Our philosophical categories can at least help in understanding this event which is,
however, a pivot and foundation for approaching the truth of sin and salvation, a
presupposition for finding meaning in the tragedy of history.
,,For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive;” “for as by a man came
death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor 15.22, 21 RSV). The
Apostle Paul insists on the inclusion of the entire nature in one person, but the way in which
or how this is accomplished, he indicates only with images. He speaks of the “dividing wall of
hostility” which has been broken down in the flesh of Christ (Eph 2.14), of the “wild olive
tree” which has been grafted onto the “cultivated olive tree” (Rom 11. 24). Nevertheless, his
insistence on the abolition of death “through death”— to which the Church returns
ceaselessly— permits us to articulate an attempt at interpretation, beyond the symbolism of
the images: We may say, given the inadequacy of our language, that the personal freedom
of Christ, accepting death willingly, leads human nature to the total renunciation of every
demand of self-existence. And since each human death is the obligatory and given
elimination of the individual’s existential autonomy, the love of God accepts each death in
the way in which he accepted the sacrifice of his incarnate Son, as a removal of the
resistance of the created to his reception by God.
Thus, in the person of Christ, risen and ascended “in the flesh”, God receives “all flesh”,
when he lays down in death the demands of his self-existence; God is united with every one
and gives him life. The death which was the “last enemy”
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(I Cor 15.26) is proved now to be a triumph of the love of God, an entry into life. Therefore,
“we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord... we know that while we
are at home in the body we are away from the Lord... For we know that if the earthly tent we
live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in
the heavens” (2 Cor 5.1-8 RSV).
But first, that “what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” in death (2 Cor 5.4), every willing
renunciation by man of his existential autonomy functions for the love of God as a repetition
and imitation of the self-renunciation on the cross of the Son, because the flesh itself which
we wear, even if it continues to draw existence and life from its biological functions, is the
same nature as the flesh of the risen Christ who participates in the life of the Trinity. In his
person our common nature has the same relationship with God as the Son has with the
Father. And the love of the Father for his incarnate Son is not a sentiment or subjective
experience, but a life-giving activity bestowing essence, constitutive of what exists.
Therefore, when our individual flesh lays aside unwillingly (in death) or willingly (in baptism,
spiritual discipline or martyrdom) the resistance of its self-existence, our created hypostasis
is united with the current of life which flows through our nature after its hypostatic union with
the Divinity in the person of Christ. just as, then, the love of God created all things “through
the Word”, even so “through the incarnate Word” he renews all things and makes them
incorruptible.

l. The “eighth day”

The Church looks for “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. This
world of corruption and death will at some point in time complete its existential cycle, not in
order to sink down into the non-existence from which it proceeded, but in order that it appear
“in another form”— in order that the risen flesh of Christ be disclosed in its general, cosmic
dimensions, that the world reveal the flesh of God, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15.28).
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This will be the “eighth day” of creation: In opposition to the “week which measures time”,
the eighth day “indicates the mode of the condition beyond nature and time”.12 It will be a
time no longer of perishable succession, but a perfecting loving relationship which is fulfilled
unceasingly in a dynamic transformation “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3.18). Whatever we say
now about this future glory will be only a dim portrait of that reality. “For now we see in a
mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor 13.12 RSV).
In the dimensions of the “eighth day”, the reality of the Resurrection, the union of God with
“the whole race of Adam” is revealed, his union with all men without exception. But this
union, while it will abolish man’s natural distance from God, will not violate, not even then,
the freedom of each person. And so, for those who are “worthy”, as St Maximus says, who
accept the love of God, the union with Him will be a “divine and inconceivable pleasure”,
while for those who are “unworthy”, those who have rejected the possibility of love, it will be
“unspeakable grief”.13 No other quality of life exists on the “eighth day”: love judges, love
justifies.

12
Maximus Confessor, Chapters on Theology 1.51, P.G. 90, 1101C.
13
Ibid. 4.20, P.G. 90,1312C.
Until then we have a foretaste of what we look for within the limits of the Church, the limits of the dynamic “le
and life, by transforming individual survival into a loving relationship (with the Eucharist, spiritual discipline, w
Eucharist in common to God, because what makes us exist is his own love— even before
the general resurrection the love of God constitutes and gives life to the existence of us all,
of the living and the dead: “None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself If we live,
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we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we
die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom 14.7-8 RSV).
What is the way in which the hypostasis of the dead, even though a created nature, is given
effect and lives before the general resurrection? In what way was the human hypostasis
preserved before the incarnation of Christ and his descent among the dead? How was and
is the freedom of our personal hypostases expressed after the dissolution of biological
individuality? All these questions receive their answer not with logical propositions which do
not go beyond the possibilities of empirical verification, but with the movement of our trust
and self-surrender to the love of God. Our individual understanding confirms our individual
approach to life, the individual way of existence. Faith in God is a change in the mode of
existence, and therefore the language of faith is not related to individual comprehension,
individual intellectual self-sufficiency. It is a language hymning the love of God, a language
invoking his mercy. His own love founds our personal hypostasis “through an excess of
passionate love” and the passionate lover will never abandon his beloved to nonexistence.
Without recognition and acceptance of this divine love, death is just a shocking and
inexplicable absurdity. But on the contrary, for the faithful it is the last and extreme test of
their trust and self-surrender to God, to God who “calls into existence the things that do not
exist” (Rom 4.17).