| John Anthony McGuckin Humanity M. C. STEENBERG “Humanity” derives from the Latin humanitas, referring to the whole of the human race. In theological terms, it may refer both to the collective species of the human creature, or to the nature of man. Hence, in Orthodox theological writings, “humanity” describes both the created essence of man (thus being largely synonymous with “human nature”), or the race of those creatures who bear this nature. THEOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALS Christianity is, at its heart, a story of humanity. It takes its beginning from the apostolic encounter with the Son of God met and known in his humanity, and through that encounter reveals the economy of the salvation of humanity as a whole. The starting point for an Orthodox understanding of humanity, then, is not in a narrative or scientific definition of abstract origins of species, but in the concrete humanity encountered in the incarnate Jesus Christ. It is his person that reveals to us the authentic contours of human nature, as well as its potential for restoration and perfection in union with God. Too often, attempts to articulate a Christian definition of humanity begin with wholly protological discussions (that is, those that deal with origins, with creation). However, the christological revelation of human nature demands that the initial point of reference is not the first man (Adam), but the perfected man: the New Adam, Jesus. So it is that the fundamental affirmations the church makes about humanity come from the example of the incarnate Lord. These affirmations begin with the experience of Christ’s humanity as created and material: that he was born in the flesh and so existed in his earthly sojourn. Human nature, as beheld in this human Christ, is affirmed as a material nature, made by God of the stuff of the cosmos – that very act and reality thereby affirming the sanctity of the material in the most transcendent order possible. Humanity cannot be understood as a spiritual nature residing in a secondary material shell, or as existing in some state of corporeal purgatory: to be human is fundamentally to be material, and the existence of Christ in his material human nature enshrines the Orthodox confession that this physicality is not a defect in human nature, but a holy dimension of humankind’s created state. |
| Abstract Although much attention has been recently paid to different aspects of St Maximus’ anthropology, no complete and comprehensive overview of his doctrine of human nature within the hierarchical order of the world existence has been produced so far. In this article an attempt is made to trace main features of the human hierarchical nature incorporated in the creation in general. Man is considered as a binder of the material and spiritual worlds, as a hierarchical center of the created universe. Human dual nature is analyzed in terms of its original plan of God and distortion through the Fall. Christ oriented character of the anthropology of St Maximus is revealed. A very vivid antithesis of the corrupted body of Adam and the holy body of Christ is noted as a special contribution of st Maximus. Special place to the human mind, as the highest part of the soul possessing some unique functions is reviewed. It is discussed that the highest hierarchical priority is allotted by the Confessor to the concept of person or hypostasis in the man. The latter is defined as the highest integrative principle, unifying the human body and soul. The key characteristic of human likeness with God given in the anthropological heritage of rev. Maximus is claimed to be as follows: the key feature of the human conformity to God is the hypostasis-nature unity of the objective reality of a human. Such important features of st Maximus anthropology as Christo-centrism, multi-layerness, dynamics and subordination to the principles of the determined hierarchy as in the inner organization so in the involvement of the human nature in the hierarchy of the cosmic reality are underlined. On its highest level the hierarchical nature of the human includes in itself the uncreated Divine energies. Many scholars who have conducted research on the heritage of St Maximus the Confessor agree that he can be called the “father of Byzantine theology” 1 . He was the first to create principles of an integral system of understanding the world which, due to its unique systematized and integral character, came to be a significant alternative to Origenism. Christology and closely related to it Christian anthropology are the focus of St Maximus’s theological system. It is exactly this close link between Anthropology and Christology that becomes vital in St Maximus’s theology as he sees the Incarnation to be “the heart of the world existence – not only in terms of redemption but also in terms of the creation of the world” 2 . |
| A.V. Nesteruk 7. Humanity as Hypostasis of the Universe Defining the Humankind-Event – The Humankind-Event and the Anthropic Principle – Hypostatic Dimension of the Humankind-Event – From Anthropic Transcendentalism to Christian Platonism – Intelligibility and Meaning of the Universe: The Participatory Anthropic Principle – The Humankind-Event and the Incarnation – The Universe as Hypostatic Event There are in personality natural foundation principles which are linked with the cosmic cycle. But the personal in man is of different extraction and of different quality and it always denotes a break with natural necessity… Man as personality is not part of nature, he has within him the image of God. There is nature in man, but he is not nature. Man is a microcosm and therefore he is not part of the cosmos. – Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, pp. 94 – 95 The fact that the universe has expanded in such a way that the emergence of conscious mind in it is an essential property of the universe, must surely mean that we cannot give an adequate account of the universe in its astonishing structure and harmony without taking into account, that is, without including conscious mind as an essential factor in our scientific equations… Without man, nature is dumb, but it is man’s part to give it word: to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to the glory and majesty of the living God. – Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, p. 4 This chapter develops the idea that the phenomenon of intelligent human life in the universe, which we call the humankind-event, is not entirely conditioned (in terms of its existence) by the natural structures and laws of the universe. The actual happening of the humankind-event, which is treated as a hypostatic event, is contingent on nonnatural factors that point toward the uncreated realm of the Divine. We develop an argument that modern cosmology, if seen in a wide philosophical and theological context, provides indirect evidence for the contingency of the universe on nonphysical factors, as well as its intelligibility, established in the course of the humankind-event, which is rooted in the Logos of God and detected by human beings through the logoi of creation. The universe, as experienced through human scientific discursive thinking, thus becomes a part of the humankind-event; that is, the universe itself acquires the features of the hypostatic event in the Logos of God. Defining the Humankind-Event |
| Exhortation on the Prayer Rule St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) Bishop Ignaty (secular name, Dimitry Aleksandrovich Brianchaninov; 1807-1867) was an outstanding ecclesiastical writer and ascetic of the nineteenth century. He had no special theological education. He studied at the main engineering college in St. Petersburg and in 1824 graduated from it, receiving an officer’s rank. During the following four years he fulfilled various obediences as a novice in several monasteries, after which he took monastic vows and was appointed in 1883 as Father Superior of the St. Sergei Hermitage of the St. Petersburg Diocese. He gained profound experience in the knowledge of God by studying the works of the holy fathers. In 1857 he was consecrated bishop of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. In 1861 he retired for reasons of health and settled in the Babaevsky Monastery of St. Nicholas. Besides his feats of prayer and extensive correspondence with his spiritual children, Bishop Ignaty devoted much of his time during these years to literary work. The reader of his works discovers in their author a pastor-ascetic engaged in an intense spiritual combat and who is tragically depressed by setbacks in this struggle. The main motivation behind his ascetic works is his awareness of the damage done to human nature by sin. He wrote: “Our nature is contaminated by sin so that it is quite natural for it to generate unnatural sin” (Essays of Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov, 3 rd edition, St. Petersburg, 1905, Vol. 5, p. 435). “The Christian discerns within himself the human Fall inasmuch as he can see his own passions. Passions are the sign of the sinful mortal disease which afflicts the entire human race” (1.528). “In order to achieve success in the spiritual life, it is necessary for our passions to reveal themselves by coming to the fore. When passions reveal themselves in an ascetic he comes to grips with them” (1.345). These ideas are further elaborated in all of the works of Bishop Ignaty. In all of his writings on any subject, including practical pastoral advice, Bishop Ignaty takes the reader back to the understanding of the root cause of the misfortunes of the human race, which helps to combat each and every concrete manifestation of sin. Thus defining monastic self-reproach, he points out that it is “a good cause, counterposed to and counteracting the morbid condition of our fallen nature …” (1.345). Elsewhere he writes: “Speaking of books, one should say … that it is necessary to choose among them not the most elevated ones, but the ones that are nearest to our own condition, which describe actions pertinent to ourselves” (2.292). “When a person does not arrange his responsibilities in due order, does not attach to each of them the priority it deserves, then the fulfillment thereof cannot yield virtue, but will only produce sinful mistakes which are all the more dangerous because they have a virtuous appearance” (4.421). |
| John Anthony McGuckin Ecology BRUCE FOLTZ Etiologies of environmental crisis often indict Christianity for privileging divine transcendence at the expense of God’s immanence in nature, leaving the world bereft of divine presence and vulnerable to human exploitation. And if human beings are created “in the image of God” ( Gen. 1.27 ), they too would possess this transcendent, extra-worldly status, encouraging an “arrogant” and even “violent” attitude toward nature (White 1973). But this allegation, anticipated in the 19th century by Feuerbach and Nietzsche, overlooks deep divergences between Eastern and Western Christianity, long predating the Great Schism of 1054. For as British historian Steven Runciman has shown, there are from the beginning striking differences between East and West in cultural values, sociopolitical realities, and even differing theological capacities of the Greek and Latin languages (Runciman 2005: 8). Moreover, the first and most influential scholar to blame Christianity for environmental crisis, historian Lynn White Jr., emphasized that his criticisms applied only to the Latin West, noting that “in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men.... This view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific” (White 1973: 88). Finally, it was within Western Christendom that the technologies generating environmental problems were fashioned and perfected. So it may be important to understand how the different views and sensibilities of the Christian East – more poetic than logical, more liturgical and sacramental than juridical, better characterized by the Byzantine dome bringing heaven down to earth than by the Gothic spires pointing away from earth toward heaven – support a different, and perhaps more salutary, understanding of creation than Western Christianity. BYZANTINE THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY Orthodoxy’s understanding of the natural environment must be sought in relation to its spirituality, rather than through its theology taken as a self-sufficient enterprise. |
| Содержание Preface Abbreviations 1. The Early Chapters of the Capita 150 A. Introduction B. The General Context of the First Section The Non-Eternity of the Cosmos (1–2) The Celestial Sphere (3–7) The Terrestrial Sphere (8–14) The Natural Human Faculties (15–20) Spiritual Knowledge (21–29) Rational Nature (30–33) The Divine Nature and its Triadic Image in Man (34–40) a. The Doctrine of the Capita b. Patristic Background c. Two Contemporary Parallels i. Gregory of Sinai ii. Theoleptos of Philadelpheia Recognition of Human Weakness and the Need for Healing (41–63) 2. The Later Chapters of the Capita 150 A. Introduction Divine Illumination (64–67) Multiplicity of the Divine Energies (68–71) Basic Doctrines (72–84) The Dionysian Doctrine of Union and Distinction (85–95) Absurdities of the Akindynist Doctrines (96–103) The Imparticipability of God " s Substance (104–112) The Reply on Cyril (113–121) The Contra Acindynum (122–131) Distinction of the Divine Substance and the Divine Energy (132–145) The Light of Tabor (146–150) B. The Date of the Capita 150 C. Conclusion 3. The Text A. Previous Editions of Palamas» Works B. Manuscripts of The Capita 150 C. Printed Editions D. Indirect Witnesses E. The Tradition of the Text Hyparchetypal Variants Archetypal Errors Alpha Family Beta Family The Uspensky Edition Constitution of the Text F. Sigla and Abbreviations St. Gregory Palamas Capita 150 Appendix. St. Gregory Palamas The Reply On Cyril Selected Bibliography edited and translated by Robert E. Sinkewicz, C.S.B. The Capita 150 deserves special prominence in the Palamite corpus, equal to that of the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts. It was written in a relatively tranquil period after the triumph of Palamism in the Council of 1347 and prior to Gregory " s polemics with Nikephoros Gregoras. Gregory Palamas took this opportunity to stand back somewhat from the atmosphere of controversy and reflect at length on the larger doctrinal context of the debates and the relation of the detailed issues to this context. The Capita 150 thus opens with a discussion on the nature of human knowledge and its application to the natural and supernatural domains. These considerations lead into a profound reflection on the image of God in man. Here Gregory Palamas produces not merely a synthesis of the patristic doctrine but a genuine theological development within the Church " s tradition to meet the needs of the controversy with which the Church was confronted. After dwelling on the consequences of the Fall and the subsequent quest for healing, Palamas then reviews the principal issues of his controversy with Gregory Akindynos and his followers. |
| Stewardship as Creation Care Scripture and the Fathers When we think of the term stewardship, we frequently consider only matters related to financial support. The prevalent rendering of the term oikonomia as “stewardship” or “economy” is not very illuminating as it provides both a linguistic as well as conceptual reduction of this critical and originally scriptural word. In so doing, however, we have narrowed the scope of the Bible’s teaching and neglected the depth of our Church’s tradition about our place and role in the world, indeed at a time when such knowledge is more vital and critical than ever before. If we turn to the Church Fathers, we see that they attribute the highest importance to oikonomia (stewardship or economy), which in their eyes implied a broader and more inclusive concept of revelation and salvation, identified withGod’s vision and desire to save the whole world. For our great theological teachers and spiritual masters, economy in fact refers to our very salvation by the allembracing love of God for all humankind and to the universal compassion of the Creator for all creation. Somewhere along the line, we unfortunately shrunk the theme of “stewardship” to purely monetary terms that primarily include making contributions to philanthropic organizations – probably as a result of a narrow interpretation of scripture, and possibly as a result of the rigid focus of modern society. All of this invariably affects not just our understanding of the moral obligation that we have toward one another as human beings, but also inevitably distorts the worldview that shapes our moral responsibility toward creation. By limiting our attention to divine commandments for human compassion, we have invariably excised from scripture the clear mandate to creation care. Yet, these two dimensions of Christian life are integrally interrelated; one cannot envisage human progress without ecological preservation. The way we treat God’s creation in nature essentially reflects the way we respect human beings created “in the image and likeness of God.” The reality is that we should respond to nature with the same tenderness that we are called to respond to people. |
| The Miracle of Saint Euphemia the All-Praised Commemorated July 11/24 Miracle of St. Euphemia The holy Great Martyr Euphemia (September 16) suffered martyrdom in the city of Chalcedon in the year 304, during the time of the persecution against Christians by the emperor Diocletian (284-305). One and a half centuries later, at a time when the Christian Church had become victorious within the Roman Empire, God deigned that Euphemia the All-Praised should again be a witness and confessor of the purity of the Orthodox teaching. In the year 451 in the city of Chalcedon, in the very church where the glorified relics of the holy Great Martyr Euphemia rested, the sessions of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (July 16) took place. The Council was convened for determining the precise dogmatic formulae of the Orthodox Church concerning the nature of the God-Man Jesus Christ. This was necessary because of the widespread heresy of the Monophysites [ " mono-physis " meaning " one nature " ], who opposed the Orthodox teaching of the two natures in Jesus Christ, the Divine and the Human natures (in one Divine Person). The Monophysites falsely affirmed that in Christ was only one nature, the Divine [i.e. that Jesus is God but not man, by nature], causing discord and unrest within the Church. At the Council were present 630 representatives from all the local Christian Churches. On the Orthodox side Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople (July 3), Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem (July 2), and representatives of St Leo, Pope of Rome (February 18) participated in the conciliar deliberations. The Monophysites were present in large numbers, headed by Dioscorus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and the Constantinople archimandrite Eutychius. After prolonged discussions the two sides could not come to a decisive agreement. The holy Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople proposed that the Council submit the decision of the Church dispute to the Holy Spirit, through His undoubted bearer St Euphemia the All-Praised, whose wonderworking relics had been discovered during the Council’s discussions. |
| The Ten Commandments Among the innumerable ethical laws and rules that regulate human behavior the most concise, clear and important are the Ten commandments. Although they were written many thousands of years ago when social conditions were drastically different from ours, their importance and authority has not diminished. To the contrary, the more our lives are entangled with contradictory opinions about what is right and what is wrong, the more we need the clear and unambiguous guidance of our Creator and Law-Giver. The Laws of Nature and Morality Among the innumerable ethical laws and rules that regulate human behavior the most concise, clear and important are the Ten commandments. Although they were written many thousands of years ago when social conditions were drastically different from ours, their importance and authority has not diminished. To the contrary, the more our lives are entangled with contradictory opinions about what is right and what is wrong, the more we need the clear and unambiguous guidance of our Creator and Law-Giver. Morally sensitive people have always regarded God’s commandments with great esteem and considered them to be an inexhaustible source of wisdom and inspiration. “Thy commandments make me wiser than my enemies … Great peace have those who love Thy law, and nothing causes them to stumble,” we read in the book of Psalms (Excerpts from Psalm 119:1, 77, 97, 98, 165). For a believing Christian the commandments of God can be likened to a bright star which guides him to the Kingdom of Heaven. When comparing the commandments of God to the laws of nature, we can discern some interesting similarities and differences. For instance, they both originate from the same Divine Source and complement each other, with one set of rules regulating physical events and the other set governing the behavior of moral beings. The difference lies in that, while the laws of nature are compulsory, the moral laws appeal to the will of a free and intelligent spirit. In endowing us with the freedom of choice God has elevated us above all other creatures. This moral freedom gives us an opportunity to grow spiritually, perfect ourselves and even to become like our Creator. On the other hand this freedom places on us great responsibility and may become dangerous and destructive if misused. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Church (Orthodox Ecclesiology) TAMARA GRDZELIDZE THE PURPOSE OF THE CHURCH The purpose of the church is to restore fallen humanity and thereby reconcile the whole creation to God. Its sacramental life is the means to fulfill this purpose. The divine economy of salvation is the foundational principle of the church. The mystery of human salvation leads to the mystery of the salvation of the whole creation which is God’s ultimate goal. In this life the church bears witness to a new existence revealed through the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus Christ – “The Church has been planted in the world as a Paradise,” says St. Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. 5.20.2) – and this new reality already proclaimed is destined finally to attain the status of the new creation. The nature of the church, as Orthodoxy understands it, is deeply experiential and accordingly it is difficult to describe it by any single formula that carries an overwhelming authority. The early church knew no such single doctrinal definition and the reason for this is that, according to Fr. Georges Florovsky (1972: 57), the reality of the church was only made manifest to the “spiritual vision” of the church fathers. The nature of the church can thus be experienced and described, but never fully defined. The closest approximation to a doctrinal definition within orthodoxy is the clause in the creed, which affirms that the church is “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.” The church is the place par excellence of a believer’s participation in the mysteries of God. The faithful participate in the divine mysteries from the very beginning of their life in Christ through the sacrament of baptism and reach the height of that participation in the Eucharistic celebration. The very essence of this participation is experiential, something that can be readily observed in the case of children whose love exceeds their understanding, or orthodox people of little knowledge but great faith. The love of God manifested to human beings and creation is reciprocated in faith by the church’s constant returning the love of God through the praise of the faithful. This human participation in the divine mysteries is nurtured always by the belief and knowledge that “God is love” (1 John 4.8), and this movement of praise that constitutes the church’s inner life is the height of creation – its meaning and fulfillment. |
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