| In order for us to even attempt to understand St. Justin, it is important to first and foremost know what the word ecumenism meant to him from an Orthodox perspective. The covering sheet of his notes stated: “The Orthodox Church=Ecumenism by catholicity (Russian: sobornost=“to gather”).” 5 Let us for a moment focus on the understanding of the term catholicity/catholic (sobornost). The word is understood in the Russian sense of meaning, 6 namely a “spiritual community of any jointly living people,” “to gather,” which has its core in the cooperation between people and the denying of individualism. The difference in the Western understanding of the word is almost non-existent, it is just important to understand that “catholicity/catholic” in this case has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church, but rather refers to the word “catholic” itself. The Western use of the word is often understood as “universal”, which can be seen as having the same or roughly the same meaning as the Russian “Sobornost”. Therefore: the “catholicity” of the Christian Church is about gathering all into one . Hence, the word “ecumenism/ecumenical” can now in this context be understood as St. Justin himself explains: “Ecumenism: The catholicity (sobornost) of heaven and earth, of God and man, the soul of universality, of evangelic and orthodox ecumenism: We live on earth but we store up for ourselves treasures in heaven (Matt. 6:20). Everything was the holy catholicity (sobornost); which lies in the unity of the theanthropic (Divine-human) Church=the God-man Christ the Lord. Body on earth, heart in heaven: Our wishes should be catholic; and they are such when they are holy (Matt 6:21). And man’s holiness is in God, more precisely: in the God-man. And in the Person of the God-man: God transfers all his attributes, including holiness, to man. Without God – man is a tiny mosquito (…) everything was created for the holy theanthropic catholicity and unity (Matt 6:25-34) (…) ‘Whoever receives you, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives the one who sent me’ (Matt 10:40). Therein=in Him the entire catholicity, the entire universality, the entire ecumenism. Where He is—all of those are present and more; the Entire Holy Trinity [is present]. Everything from Him and everything in Him! Everything towards Him.” 7 The saint spends a lot of time deepening his explanation of ecumenism as he sees the Orthodox Church seeing it. But to show and explain it all would take up too much space. Instead focus has been put on the one that is at the core of all else—the one that is the foundation of St. Justin’s understanding of his own title: “The Orthodox Church=Ecumenism by catholicity”. Ecumenism is only real if it places the God-man in the center. The WWC statement from Amsterdam 1948 in a similar fashion states: “The World council of Churches is a fellowship of churches that accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior” 8 |
| In truth God as a man was born on earth! Why? That we might live through him (1 John 4:9). For without the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ, human life is wholly and completely a suicidal absurdity, and death is truly the most outright and horrible absurdity on earth. To comprehend death means comprehending life in all its depth, height, and limitlessness. This can only be done by the All-man-loving Lord, Who by His immeasurable love becomes man and forever remains the God-man in the human world. Only as God-life, life in God, can human life acquire its eternal meaning. But outside of God, life is the most ridiculous absurdity, filled with offense and bitterness. Your life, O man, can find its only reasonable, rational, logical meaning in God alone. And your thought, brother, your human thought finds its divine and immortal meaning only in God, only as God-thought. Human thought only becomes God-thought in the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the same with your senses, O man—only in God do they find their divine, immortal meaning. Without this, your senses are your most merciless torturers, continually crucifying you on an eternal cross, after which there is no resurrection. And the conscience? Where does this ferocious stranger come from in us, people? It too only unites with its divine and eternal meaning as God-conscience. Without this, human conscience is a ferocious and ghastly absurdity. And your death, and my death, and the death of all people—isn’t it the cruelest torture for human beings throughout the world? Yes, it truly is. But it too, only as the death of the God-man, gains its eternal meaning through the resurrection of the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ; for through Him and only through Him does victory over death happen and death in the human world can be comprehended. Thus also everything human, the entire human with all his innumerable infinities, only as the grace-filled God-man in the deified and all-vivifying Body of the God-man Christ—the Church—gains his divine, eternal, God-human, and higher meaning. |
| Jesus Christ Byzantine Christology has always been dominated by the categories of thought and the terminology of the great controversies of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries about the person and identity of Jesus Christ. As we have shown in Part I, these controversies involved conceptual problems, as well as the theological basis of life. In the mind of Eastern Christians, the entire content of the Christian faith depends upon the way in which the question «Who is Jesus Christ?» is answered. The five ecumenical councils which issued specific definitions on the relationship between the divine and the human natures in Christ have at times been viewed as a pendulant development: from the emphasis on the divinity of Christ, at Ephesus (431); to the reaffirmation of His full humanity, at Chalcedon (451); then back to His divinity, with the acceptance of Cyril " " s idea of Theopaschism, at Constantinople (553); followed by a new awareness of His human «energy» or «will,» again at Constantinople (680), and of His human quality of describability in the anti-iconoclastic definition of Nicaea II (787). Still, the opinion is often expressed in Western theological literature that Byzantine Christology is crypto-Monophysite, and offered as an explanation for the lack of concern among Eastern Christians for man in his secular or social creativity. We hope that the following discussion will shed some light on these frequently recurring issues. 1. God and Man To affirm that God became man, and that His humanity possesses all the characteristics proper to human nature, implies that the Incarnation is a cosmic event. Man was created as the master of the cosmos and called by the creator to draw all creation to God. His failure to do so was a cosmic catastrophe, which could be repaired only by the creator Himself. Moreover, the fact of the Incarnation implies that the bond between God and man, which has been expressed in the Biblical concept of «image and likeness,» is unbreakable, The restoration of creation is a «new creation,» but it does not establish a new pattern, so far as man is concerned; it reinstates man in his original divine glory among creatures and in his original responsibility for the world, It reaffirms that man is truly man when he participates in the life of God; that he is not autonomous, either in relation to God, or in relation to the world; that true human life can never be «secular.» In Jesus Christ, God and man are one; in Him, therefore, God becomes accessible not by superseding or eliminating the humanum, but by realizing and manifesting humanity in its purest and most authentic form. |
| Athanasius, «God became man in order that man might become God in him.» 43 Consequently, according to Palamas, a radical change intervened after the Incarnation in the relationship between God and man, which leaves all other experiences and discoveries–either in the Old Testament or among the Greeks–as mere shadows of the realities to come. He writes: «Deification would have belonged to all nations even before (Christ) came if it naturally pertains to the rational soul, just as today it would belong to everyone irrespective of faith or piety» (p. 85). This does not imply, however, that Palamas understands deification in Augustinian terms, implying a strict opposition between «nature» and «grace.» As has been shown by many modern historians, Greek patristic anthropology is «theocentric». At his creation, man was endowed with some «divine characteristics» in that he is God " s «image and likeness». According to St. Maximus the Confessor, these characteristics are «being» and «eternity» (which God possesses by nature, but gives also to man), 44 and, earlier, St. Irenaeus of Lyons identified the «spirit» naturally belonging to man with the Holy Spirit. 45 Consequently, man is not fully man unless he is in communion with God: He is «open upwards» and destined to share God " s fellowship. 46 However, because God remains absolutely transcendent in His essence, man " s communion with Him has no limit. It never reaches an End, which would be a dead end. God is both transcendent and inexhaustible. Man " s communion with Him can never be «closed» through exhaustion. This is the transcendence that Palamas defends, and sees as the most central, the most positive and the most essential aspect not only of hesychasm, as a tradition of monastic spirituality, but as a basic element of the Christian faith as such: In Christ, man enters in communion not with «the God of the philosophers and the savants», but the One who–in human language–can only be called «more-than-God». Hypostatically, «personally,» the Logos–second Person of the Trinity–by assuming the fulness of humanity, became in His Body the source or locus of deification. |
| No thinking Christian, of course, believes in the atheist caricature of a heaven “in the sky,” although there are some naive Protestants who would place heaven in a distant galaxy or constellation; the whole visible creation is fallen and corrupt, and there is no place in it anywhere for the invisible heaven of God, which is a spiritual and not a material reality. But many Christians, in order to escape the mockery of unbelievers and avoid even the slightest taint of any materialistic conception, have gone to an opposite extreme and declare that heaven is “nowhere.” Among Roman Catholics and Protestants there are sophisticated apologies which proclaim that heaven is “a state, not a place,” that “up” is only a metaphor, the Ascension of Christ (Luke 24:50–51, Acts 1:9–11) was not really an “ascension,” but only a change of state. The result of such apologies is that heaven and hell become very vague and indefinite conceptions, and the sense of their reality begins to disappear – with disastrous results for Christian life, because these are the very realities toward which our whole earthly life is directed. All such apologies, according to the teaching of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, are based on the false idea of the modern philosopher Descartes that everything that is not material is “pure spirit” and is not limited by time and space. This is not the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Bishop Ignatius writes: “The fantasy of Descartes concerning the independence of spirits on space and time is a decisive absurdity. Everything that is limited is necessarily dependent on space” (vol. III, p. 312). “The numerous quotations cited above from the Divine service books and the works of the Fathers of the Orthodox Church decide with complete satisfaction the question as to where paradise and hell are located.... With what clarity the teaching of the Orthodox Eastern Church indicates that the location of paradise is in the heaven and the location of hell is in the bowels of the earth” (vol. III, pp. 308–9; the emphasis is his). Here we shall only indicate just how this teaching is to be interpreted. |
| In spite of its very widespread, but rather peripheral, influence, the Dionysian concept of the angelic world never succeeded in eliminating the more ancient and more Biblical ideas about the angels. Particularly striking is the opposition between the very minor role ascribed by Dionysius to the «archangels» (second rank from the bottom of the angelic hierarchy) and the concept found in Jewish apocalyptic writings, including Daniel, Jude, and Revelation, where the archangels Michael and Gabriel rank as the «chief captains» of God " " s celestial armies. This idea has been preserved in the liturgy, which should be considered as the main and most reliable source of Byzantine «angelology.» Involved in the struggle against the demonic powers of the cosmos, the angels represent, in a way, the ideal side of creation. According to Byzantine theologians, they were created before the visible world, 224 and their essential function is to serve God and His image, man. The scriptural idea that the angels perpetually praise God ( Is 6:3 ; Lk 2:13 ) is a frequent theme of the Byzantine liturgy, especially of the Eucharistic canons, which call the faithful to join the choir of angelsi.e., to recover their original fellowship with God. This reunion of heaven and earth, anticipated in the Eucharist, is the eschatological goal of the whole of creation. The angels contribute to its preparation by participating invisibly in the life of the cosmos. 11. Man The view of man prevailing in the Christian East is based upon the notion of «participation» in God. Man has been created not as an autonomous, or self-sufficient, being; his very nature is truly itself only inasmuch as it exists «in God» or «in grace.» Grace, therefore, gives man his «natural«» development. This basic presupposition explains why the terms «nature» and «grace,» when used by Byzantine authors, have a meaning quite different from the Western usage; rather than being in direct opposition, the terms «nature» and «grace» express a dynamic, living, and necessary relationship between God and man, different by their natures, but in communion with each other through God» " s energy, or grace. Yet man is the center of creationa «microcosm " and his free self-determination defines the ultimate destiny of the universe. 1. Man and God |
| Man’s value, Fr. Justin testifies, is determined by his inner world. In its unfathomable depths, the inner world is in contact with Absolute Reality, of Which man is the bearer. By maintaining such a connection, that is, by absorbing in themselves the eternity of the spiritual kingdom, Christians by virtue of their continuous spiritual growth become infinite, although not without beginning. Indeed, who can explore the metaphysical depths of man? For who among men knoweth the things of a man, except the spirit of the man that is in him (1 Corinthians 2:11). He who earnestly observes the material and spiritual realities of the universe cannot but feel the presence of an infinite mystery in all phenomena. The human spirit persistently strives to comprehend the mysterious. The constant movement of the human spirit in that direction is a second, supernatural component of him as person. Bearing this natural component in mind, Fr. Justin resolves the fundamental question of anthropology in this manner: “We can conclude that man is man precisely because he is the bearer of an individual supernatural gift that manifests itself in perfection, creativity, and mental activity.” The entire human spirit longs for eternity: through consciousness and through the senses, through will and through all life – which means that it longs for immortality. Thus, Fr. Justin believes that the human aspiration to infinity, to immortality, belongs to the very essence of the human spirit. Created in God’s image, man is full of spiritual yearning, since the Divine image is the principle component of man’s essence. This yearning of the Divinely-imaged soul towards its Archetype is natural. By giving man the commandment: Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect (Mathew 5:48), the Lord Jesus Christ indicates the grace-filled possibility of realizing the Divine-image in human nature, since He would not have commanded the impossible. The image of God in man’s nature, Fr. Justin remarks, has an ontological and a teleological meaning: ontological, because the essence of the human being is found therein; and teleological, because it indicates the goal of life, which is unity with God. |
| St. Justin saw humanism as evil, pure evil and totally opposite to God, the Gospel and the Church. The source of this humanism and its entrance and increased influence in society has its roots in the papacy and the “infallibility” of the pope, according to St. Justin. St. Justin sees the pope as the model of the anti-Christian theory of “the ubermensch”. The fall of the pope, as well as the fall of Adam and Judas, the saint sees as the three biggest falls of mankind. St. Justin sees “papism” and its earthly and human power as the pan-heresy of humanism, as the putting of man before the God-man in the center, instead ending up where man is the measure of all things, and no longer God. St. Justin also sees the pope as the father of Protestantism, which he sees as the final stage of “papism”: “each [Protestant] believer – a self-appointed and separate pope” 15 (This is why the term “papism” also for St. Justin includes Protestants, who according to St. Justin all consider themselves as popes.) By this he is referring to the fact that the pope is (in his understanding) held infallible in questions of faith according to how he understands the Roman Catholic teaching, while every human is infallible in understanding the bible in Protestantism, according to St. understanding of these confessions. Both of these he sees as man-worship, humanolatry, scholastic and rationalistic bacchanalias. “Hence so many sects [Protestants]: it is actually all one, having been fathered by the pope, by his humanolatry and by his man-godhood. In opposition to: the God-man.” 16 European humanism is essentially anti-human and equal to “papism”, according to St. Justin. Humanists have one soul: “a papistic-protestant soul” 17 . He calls the humanistic society of Europe the “mount Olympus of the Roman-Protestant Europe; Zeus=the Pope” 18 . Through humanism, the European man degenerates himself into a homunculus, a non-man. For St. Justin, at the heart of humanism lies rationalism, which he also sees at the heart of scholasticism: “For scholasticism and rationalism gauge everything ‘according to man’, by man; but man is incomparably more extensive than all this, in the same proportion as the God-man is more extensive than man” 19 |
| According to Maximus the Confessor, God, in creating man, «communicated» to him four of His own properties: being, eternity, goodness, and wisdom. 225 Of these four divine properties, the first two belong to the very essence of man; the third and the fourth are merely offered to man« " s willful aptitude. The idea that his «participation» in God is man» " s particular privilege is expressed in various ways, but consistently, in the Greek patristic tradition. Irenaeus, for example, writes that man is composed of three elements: body, soul, and Holy Spirit; 226 and the Cappadocian Fathers speak of an «efflux» of the Holy Spirit in man. 227 Gregory of Nyssa, in his treatise On the Creation of Man, in discussing man before the Fall, attributes to him the «beatitude of immortality,» «justice,» «purity.» «God is love,» writes Gregory, «and source of love. The creator of our nature has also imparted to us the character of love. . . . If love is absent, all the elements of the image are deformed.» 228 Jean Danieloú " s comments on this passage may, in fact, be extended to Greek patristic thought as a whole: Gregory identifies realities which Western theology considers distinct. He ascribes to man certain traits, such as reason or freedom, which the West attributes to the [created] spirit; others such as apatheia or love (called grace by Westerners), attributed to divine life; as well as the effects of final glorification: incorruptibility and beatitude. For Gregory, the distinctions do not exist. 229 Thus, the most important aspect of Greek patristic anthropology, which will be taken for granted by the Byzantine theologians throughout the Middle Ages, is the concept that man is not an autonomous being, that his true humanity is realized only when he lives «in God» and possesses divine qualities. To express this idea, various authors use various terminologiesOrigenistic, Neoplatonic, or Biblical; yet there is a consensus on the essential openness of man, a concept which does not fit into the Western categories of «nature» and «grace.» " |
| Obviously, the dual nature of man is not simply a static juxtaposition of two heterogeneous elements, a mortal body and an immortal soul: it reflects a dynamic function of man between God and creation. Describing the anthropology of Maximus, Lars Thunberg is fully justified when he writes: «Maximus seems to stress the independence of the elements [i.e., soul and body], not primarily in order to maintain the immortality of the soul in spite of its relationship to the body, but in order to underline the creative will of God as the only constitutive factor for both, as well as for their unity.» 235 We are here back to the point made at the beginning of this section: man is truly man because he is the image of God, and the divine factor in man concerns not only his spiritual aspectas Origen and Evagrius maintainedbut the whole of man, soul and body. This last point is the reason why a majority of Byzantine theologians describe man in terms of a trichotomist scheme: spirit (or mind), soul, body. Their trichotomism is very directly connected with the notion of participation in God as the basis of anthropology. We have seen that this theocentrism appears in Irenaeus» use of Pauline trichotomism: Spirit, soul, body. 236 Under Origenistic influence, the Fathers of the fourth century, followed by the later Byzantine authors, prefer to speak of mind (nous), soul, and body. The desire to avoid ambiguity concerning the identity of the «spirit» and to affirm the created character of the human «spirit» may also have contributed to this evolution. But, even then, Origenistic and Evagrian terminology was unsatisfactory, because the concept of the nous was connected with the myth of eternal pre-existence, original Fall, and disincarnate restoration. Although it reflected satisfactorily the theocentric aspect of patristic anthropology, this terminology failed to emphasize the function of man in the visible world. Thus, in Maximus the Confessor, the human mind, though certainly understood as the element par excellence connecting man with God, is also seen as a created function of man« " s created psychosomatic unity. |
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