Nielsen’s Nook

Humanity’s Relationship to God
The Image of God that every human being is represents the basic building block in understanding our relationship to God even after the Fall. The redemption of fallen humans required that Christ take on the same ’stuff’ as they were and are. St. Athanasius writes, “The death of all was being accomplished in the body of the Lord, and on the other hand, death and corruption were destroyed by the Word which dwelt in that body.” (p 118)

This dynamic of dying and purification lead us to the spiritual relationship of humanity to God in Christ. Major aspects of this Spirituality can be summarized as such:

• Original participation
• Analogous Freedom of the Image of God
• Sin as a consequence of servitude to the demonic
• Redemption as a recapitulation of the human nature in the risen Christ

Meyendorff, again, warns his Western readers that Anselm or the Augustinian vs. Pelagian controversy are alien paradigms to these Eastern concepts. Reading these alien paradigms into the Eastern will inevitably result in skewing our understanding of what the East is actually saying on their own terms.¹

During the time of the great controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the monks focused on the incarnation of the church in its heavenly aspect as opposed to the institutional structures rooted in this world [Dualism?]. They were preoccupied with realizing the participation in the divine life, from which Adam was deprived and which became accessible again in Christ.

As mentioned in previous chapters, Evagrius employed Platonic thought (viz. Metaphysics) explaining the Fall of the νους from its original dignity being now consigned to a bodily state. His system and terminology are based first of all on a distinction between praxis (πρακτική μέθοδος) and theoria (or γνωσις). The praxis was double edged. First there was the fight against the passions and second the practice of the evangelical commands. “The passions” (τά πάθη) were not simply a state of the soul but a means of the devil to enslave humanity. (p 119)

In speaking of this fight against the passions, Evagrius intimates that humans are most vulnerable when they are idle. Temptation is external to the human being who is the victim of the passions. All can be vanquished by faith which leads to continence and ultimately to apatheia (απάθεια), the supreme aim of the praxis. It is this arrival at impassibility in which a human being would find herself free to develop in herself the divine agape, consecrating herself entirely to theoria, “of which ‘intellectual’ and perpetual prayer is the most adequate expression.” (p 120)

While for Evagrius the state of prayer is an impassible state, as a state of liberation it also implies dematerialization [neo-Platonic metaphysic]. Thus prayer for Evagrius is the ‘prelude to the immaterial gnosis’ (προοίμιον της αϋλου γνώσεως). “…[A]s for Origen,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “the ψυχή (soul) would be for Evagrius a distortion of the νους (intellect), which moves away from God by becoming material.” (p 121) Once liberated, the intellect can engage in theoria without being distorted by the passions which once held the intellect captive. Now the intellect contemplates in light of the Logos.

Ultimately the liberated can contemplate and know God himself, being predicated on the Origenist metaphysic that drew a “natural kinship” between the divine and intellectual. (p 121). In great (and this writer would say problematic) divergence from the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Dionysius, Evagrius blurs the distinction between Creator and creature when he writes, “God does not transcend the intellect; once purified, detached from matter and ’simple’ in its contemplation, the intellect sees God as he is, in his essence.” (p 122) The result being an extreme form of Pelagianism, being seen most extremely in the Isochrist monks, “who claimed that they became ‘equal to Christ’ by the restoration of their minds in contemplation of God…” (p 122)

Alternately, a tendency that excluded Platonic dualism enjoyed great influence, seeing humanity’s way towards deification in a Christ-centered sacramental spirituality. The so called St. Macarius of Egypt (some think him to be Symeon of Mesopotamia).

The asceticism of Evagrius and Macarius must be understood in a more full orbed context, incorporating the assumptions about the nature of sin, the original destiny of humanity and salvation in terms of deification. For example, Evagrius taught that the passions were manifestations of the corruption of human nature. In other words, sin as an external action only manifests our “passionate” state. (p 123) This way of viewing sin gave way to the role of the “spiritual father”, being a guide for the journey through this world.

Many aspects of the ascetical tradition of the Christian East can present to the Western observer a Pelagian aspect…. [If] one remembers the conception of the image of God as it prevails in the Greek Fathers, the problem of the relationship between grace and human freedom is on a different level from that which opposed Augustine to Pelagius in the West. Nature, and therefore true freedom, presuppose communion with God in grace…. It is not the blasphemous juxtaposition of divine grace and human effort but the concrete realization in Jesus Christ of man’s primitive image. (p 124)

Or as Gregory of Nyssa writes, “What has been made in all aspects in the image of the divinity must undoubtedly possess in its nature a free and independent will, in order that participation in the divine advantages should be the prize of virtue.” This doctrine of synergism (συνεργεία) is developed further in Marcarius:

The more one loves, the more one gives oneself to the fight, in one’s body and in one’s soul, in order to accomplish the commandments, the greater the communion one achieves with the Spirit into the spiritual growth of the renewing of the mind; acquiring salvation by grace and divine gift, but receiving by faith, by love, and by the effort of free choice, progress and increase in the measure of this spiritual age….Thus, eternal life will be inherited by grace, but also in all righteousness, since it is not only through the divine grace and power without human collaboration (συνεργεία) and effort that progress is made… (p 125)

A passage like the one from Macarius above will sound Pelagian or semi-Pelagian unless Eastern notions of participation and communion accepted. Human freedom and effort are to be understood as entailing participation in the divine life. This in turn assumes real communion with the Archetype of whom humanity is image. This is what the Christian East calls deification. This is for Athanasius and Cyril the very basis of the Gospel.

Deification implies then that the soul becomes one with God. Humanity is called to participate in God, without there ever being any confusion between God’s nature and that of the person, without any diminution of human freedom. In this a person fulfills the destiny for which humanity was created.

Byzantine monastics sought to fill their minds with God pressing forward towards the goal of deification. One significant manifestation of this thought is seen in the Jesus Prayer an essential element of Byzantine hesychasm (’ησυχία rest or contemplation). Thus constant prayer is the mark of a mind truly freed from the passions. Isaac of Nineveh writes:

When the Spirit establishes his dwelling in man, the latter can no longer stop praying, for the Spirit never ceases praying in him. Whether he sleeps or stays awake, prayer is not separated from his soul. (p 127)

It is in Christ that humanity recovers his original destiny, rediscovers true freedom which perished in its slavery to Satan. In Christ humanity makes use of this regained freedom, working with the Holy Spirit, that a person may love and know God. It is deification (θέωσις) that gives the mystical character to Byzantine spirituality. ‘Mystical’ here is referring not to the subjective experience but the objective reality of union with Christ. As a person is the image of God, deification is the free and conscious participation in the divine life, which is proper only to humanity. As St. Athanasius gives in his great patristic principle: “If God did not become man, man cannot become God.” (p 129)

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¹ I might add here how much I have enjoyed the interaction with Acolyte4236. While Meyendorff’s point is well taken here, I - as a Westerner - do not know how to gain this understanding with out extended dialogue with those who do have these categories already in place.

The first five chapters considered the successive problems of Eastern Christianity from the fifth century C.E.:

1. Christological Crisis
2. Origenism
3. Integration of neo-Platonic thought

In the context of these crises at least three basic truths of the Christian religion were at stake:

1. Salvation of humanity
2. Humanity’s relationship with God
3. Humanity’s final destiny

The full force of St. Athanasius’ polemic against Arianism would evaporate if the Word were nothing more than a glorified creature. Thus he could say, God “became man in order that man might become God in him.” (p 113)

Salvation of Humanity
Three elements are key to understanding the Eastern conception of salvation:

1. Image of God in humanity and the destiny of that image
2. Original Sin
3. Redemption

The Image of God and Its Destiny
There is no consensus patrum for the exegesis of Genesis 1:26-27. Both the depth of what the image consists and the breadth of its distinctions must be considered. On the one hand, St. Irenaeus argued that image included the whole person (material and immaterial, body and soul). On the other hand, a later tradition, influenced by Platonic anthropology, said that image only pertained to the νοῦς (mind). Regarding the breadth of distinctions, we are considering two terms: εἰκών (image) and ὁμοίωσις (resemblance). Irenaeus and Origin saw a fundamental distinction between the two words, while Cyril of Alexandria and Athanasius regarded them as synonyms.

There is an “absolute consistency” in the Greek patristics that asserts that the image of God is not something external to humanity, that is received by humanity, and preserved by human nature as some kind of property independent of its relationships with God. “Image implies a participation in the divine nature.” (p 114)

So even Adam in the garden had to go beyond himself and receiving “illuminating grace”. For the Eastern Church the notion of “grace is identified with that of participation; grace is never a created gift but is a communion with divine life.” Or as R. Leys writes about St. Gregory of Nyssa, “grace makes man in the image of God….the world was created by grace.” Nature and grace presuppose one another in the Fathers. “Nature stops being really ‘natural’ if it abandons its own destiny, which is to communicate with God and to rise ever higher in the knowledge of the Unknowable.” (p 115)

Freedom then, being entailed in image, presumes participation in the divine life. St. Basil tells us that Adam received from the Creator a free life (αὐθαίρετον ζωήν). Thus, neither nature or freedom are opposed to grace; rather, they suppose it. St. Cyril explains that since we understand the Diety to be free, and humanity is His image, then originally humanity was free.

But original freedom also supposes the possibility of the fall, which the Fathers interpreted as a revolt against God and therefore as a sort of suicide, for a crime directed against God [archetype] necessarily deals a blow at man [ectype] himself. (p 116)

Original existence presupposed free participation in God through the intermediary of the intellect; the fall enslaved humanity to Satan through the intermediary of the passions on account of separation from God.

Sin is thought of as a deadly illness (φθορά) contracted by Adam and passed on to his posterity. The consequences of sin may be transmitted to others; however, the guilt of sin remains with the culpable individual. The human race possess the corrupted human nature passed down from Adam; however, the race does not partake of Adam’s guilt, but merely imitates it. Sin simply darkened the image and limited human freedom.

The redemption of human nature accomplished by Christ the new Adam consisted essentially in the fact that a sinless hypostasis, even that of the Logos, freely took over human nature in the very state of corruption in which it was (and this implied death) and by the resurrection re-established its original relationship with God. In Christ, man participated again in the eternal life destined for him by God. … In the same way in which corruption appeared to the Greek Fathers as a disease contracted by man rather than a punishment inflicted by divine justice, so are the death and resurrection of the incarnate Word (the sacrifice for which Christ was both priest and the victim) understood by them as, first, the accomplishment in Christ of our common destiny, and then as a new creation that could not be achieved unless the human nature of Christ had really become ours, in death itself. (p 117)

I wanted to let those of you who read this blog that I have not forgotten you. With graduation, moving, a new job, preaching commitments and contracts up to my eye-balls with Nielsen Digital, - not to mention a commitment to make thoughtful posts here - I have not had the time to reflect and contemplate that I need. This crazy schedule should let up by July and so I hope to be back with the final part of chapter 6 from Meyendorff’s Christ in Eastern Christian Thought at that time. Thank you much for your patience.

Two dangers became evident in Dionysian thought that stemmed from the notions of unions and distinctions in God:

1. Pantheism
2. Platonic Emanationism

These dangers are indigenous to any form of Platonism. Pseudo-Dionysius (PD) avoided the problem of emanationism, in which each emanation of the divine implied a fragmentation of God having lost its fullness of the divine being as it emanated. He did avoids this writing:

It is common, synthetic, and unique for the whole Diety to be participated in fully and entirely by all the participants, and never by any of them in a partial way, as the central point of a circle is participated in by all the radii … without being in any way fragmented. As for the unpartakableness of the Diety, universal cause, it also transcends [these participations], for there is with it no sort of contact, no sort of community, nor any synthesis between it and its participants. (p 97)

In other places PD distinctly divorces himself from neo-Platonism and articulates a Christian knowledge of God that accommodates neo-Platonist categories. Nevertheless, PD “cleverly avoids” explicit reference to the personalist concept of hypostasis. In a well-known passage from On the Divine Names, PD speaks of God being at once Trinity and Monad.

Two Great Dionysian Victories
In trying to use “against the Greeks the Greeks’ own goods”, PD accomplishes two great victories in essential areas. First, he successfully demonstrates that the knowledge of God is not discursive or identifiable with any natural process. Rather, it transcends our natural faculties and represents a mode of knowledge sui generis. Second, PD goes beyond Origen emanationism and pantheism in showing that the divine manifestations (i.e., “names”) in the world do not interfere with his essential transcendence. (p 99)

It would seem almost certain that PD’s intent was to protect (advance?) the Christian tradition in the context of the neo-Platonic intellectual culture in which he participated. Specifically, he was seeking a method which would allow for a deductive rediscovery of the proper order of things in the world, incorporating Christian religious forms into the intelligible structures of late neo-Platonism.

Philosophically Christian
PD remains fundamentally Christian. He maintains that God is still “above” the “Platonic One”, not belonging to the lower hierarchical orders. Further, he demonstrates that the hierarchical procession is not a diminution of the divine being but God’s presence was fully in each being. Dionysius is the source of the classical classification of the angels into nine orders, subdivided into three triads, which has no foundation in Scripture. (p 102) He remains trapped in the sense-mind dichotomy and lacked the philosophical means to express the realities linked with the incarnation.

His ecclesiastical hierarchy sought to follow as much as possible that of the angels or celestial hierarchy. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, being essentially arbitrary, seems to have twisted the perspective followed by the ecclesiology of the Church of the first few centuries. The Dionysian hierarch, designating not only bishops but great figures like Melchizedek, is essentially a Gnostic who transmits esoteric knowledge to those below him in the hierarchy. This notion reduces the idea of a sacrament down to a transmission of personal illumination. For example, the Eucharist is for PD only an ethical lesson for the “imperfect” and not a participation in the body and blood of Christ.

Theologically Christian
In terms of theologia PD was in the tradition of the Cappadocians, overcoming the antinomy between God’s immanence and his transcendence. The different interpretation that the West has given On the Divine Names, has caused many misunderstandings between East and West on the “real sense” of Dionysian thought. (p 107)

Contributions to Christian Spirituality
Some lesser known areas of Dionysian influence are seen in ecclesiology and liturgical piety, essential elements of Christian spirituality. PD’s cosmic hierarchy sought to relate that all beings were created in view of their union with God and the universal tendency to draw closer to God (imitation). This was a view that had been central to patristic anthropology since St. Irenaeus and later developed by St. Maximus. Strangely, PD asserts this in “complete separation” from the mystery of the Incarnation. (p 108)

For PD there are two distinct modes of union with God. On the one hand, there is theologia referring to the mystical, individual and direct; on the other hand, theurgy, describing the intermediary activity of the hierarchy. Dionysian theologia belongs to the realm of piety; however, theurgia is not so simply classified. Theurgia rests on the same neo-Platonic ontology as theologia; however, its aim was to transmit gnosis (knowledge), and the sacraments themselves are reduced to initiating symbols.

Christian liturgy, in trying to satisfy the needs of the masses, underwent a transformation. Preaching insisted on the sanctity of the sacramental action. The idea of esoteric initiation borrowed from Corpus Hermeticum, was used to communicate to the faithful the sense of the sacred and to remind them of how difficult it is to approach it. In the absence of such initiation, one possesses only indirect knowledge through hierarchical intermediaries and symbols. To penetrate these mysteries requires that one initiated.

“Byzantine thought never escaped from the great problem of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christian revelation.” It was the condemnation of Origen by Justinian that brought a great blow to neo-Platonism, which had gained respect in Christian circles after it had been adopted by the Gnostics. It is a view that presented the cosmos as a hierarchy in which the higher beings were intermediaries for the lower, while all emanated from God. Insofar as all idea of creation ex nihilo was excluded, this method made it impossible to avoid a monistic and essentially pantheistic worldview.

Nevertheless Origen did bring the doctrine of free-will as a corrective to neo-Platonism. However, out of the ashes of Origen’s condemnation the “Alexandrian vision” rose, a phoenix flying on the authority of a source claiming to be from Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of St. Paul in Athens. While we are certain that the historical Dionysius did not write Corpus Areopagiticum, many today believe Pseudo-Dionysius (PD) belonged to Severian circles of Syria, which represented the moderate Monophysites. These circles sought to integrate within a Christian system the hierarchical world of neo-Platonism. PD’s contribution was in introducing the corrective of God’s absolute transcendence, influencing Byzantine thinking along the lines of theology and hierarchies.

Enomius and the Cappadocian Fathers
Arian extremists of the fourth century C.E., such as Eunomius, had argued that humanity could know God in his essence; i.e., as God knows himself. The Fathers made recourse through apophatic theology (negative theology). In other words, we may know what God is not, but it is impossible to say what God is. While Eunomius maintained that God in his essence (i.e., the Father) is knowable, the Cappadocian Fathers responded with the absolute transcendence of the divine essence (i.e., God is not knowable in his essence).

It is important to understand that the negations of apophatic theology are not on account of humanity’s fallen position and resultant incapacity to know God; rather, it reflects the unknowability of God of God in his essence. Gregory of Nyssa explains to us that God “who by nature is invisible becomes visible through his energies, appearing in what is around him.” (p 94). The Fathers in their controversy with Eunomius defended the biblical conception of the living and acting God over against a “philosophical and intellectualistic conception of Deity-Essence.”

In the Platonic and Origenist traditions, the mind, in order to know God, must free itself from the prison-house of the material world and become its own self again. This was insufficient for Pseudo-Dionysius, who taught that the mind must come out of itself because the knowledge of God is beyond the mind (ὑπέρ νοῦν).

Thus, PD detaches himself from two important neo-Platonic postulates:

• The natural divinity of the νοῦς (mind)
• The knowability of the divine essence

This does not exclude … the meeting between God and created beings; on the contrary, this meeting constitutes the aim and ultimate meaning of beings. It supposes a descending movement on the part of God, out of himself, to make himself approachable and knowable, and an ascending movement on the part of beings who first of all recover their ‘analogy’ with God, that is, their capacity to participate in the virtues of God; then, coming out of themselves, to participate in the very being of God (but not in his essence), and ‘go back’ (ἐπιστροφή) to God.(p 95)

It is precisely because PD does not identify the divine essence with the Platonic “One” that it is possible for him to speak of distinctions in God.

Leontius of Jerusalem (LJ) moved to deal with the theopaschism by arguing that the Word suffered hypostatically, in his own flesh, because the hypostasis was ontologically distinct from the divine nature Christ possesses and the human nature that he assumed. “In this hypostasis resides the union of the natures or essences which otherwise cannot be confused.” (p 78) Later Byzantine theology would draw this idea from LJ (who was pulling from Cyril) into its fundamental element:

[On the one hand,] the natures, even after the union, are two, because the uncreated divine essence can never as such be partaken of in any form by the created nature…. But, on the other hand, the humanity assumed by the Logos, hypostatized in him, deified by his energies, becomes itself the source of divine life, because it is deified not simply by grace but because it is the Word’s own flesh. Here is the difference between Christ and the Christians, between hypostatic possession of divine life and deification by grace and participation. (p 78)

It is this humanity of the Word, hypostatized in him, that is the foundation of the doctrine of the deification of man as the true content of salvation. It was St. Maximus the Confessor who showed that participation in the divine did not imply the passivity of the human nature; rather, it implied the restoration fo its authentic activity.

The Latin Monk, John Maxentius, intervened both at Rome and Constantinople to have the theopaschite formula approved and is mentioned as witness to the unity that could then still unite East and West in christological questions. Justinian sought to impose this unity on the whole of the empire, in which he specifically sought to concilliate the Monophysites by making them accept Chalcedon.

In 544, Justinian pronounced an edict against Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings in which Theodoret of Cyrus attacked the anathematisms of Cyril of Alexandria, and the letter of Ibas to Mari the Persian (i.e., the so called Three Chapters, κεφάλαια). Justinian exercised caution in the way he nuanced his edict with respect to Theodoret and Ibas which prevented the entire Antiochene school from being condemned and thus depriving the church of the balance to the post humous triumph of Cyril. (p 81)

Justinian’s Confession of Faith (ὁμολογία πίστεως) is addressed to the whole fullness of the Catholic Church strongly asserts the orthodoxy of the theopaschite formulas, which had become the litmus test of orthodoxy for him. In this work Justinian follows LJ in recognizing a distinction between nature and hypostasis; nature can only exist within hypostasis. Justinian makes a significant terminological concession to the great Monophysite Severus, when he admits that the natures of Christ “can only be distinguished by speech and thought, and not as two distinct things.” (p 82) Thus, under the existing tensions, the only means of unity was to cause both sides to recognize that the difference between Cyril and Chalcedon was merely verbal and not conceptual.

In his desire to condemn Nestorianism (an important component in winning back the Monophysites), Justinian reiterated the “unity of subject in the incarnate Word.” (p 83) The only restriction to Cyril’s triumph was that was that the expression μία φύσις (one nature) was forbidden to be understood in any way other than as a synonym of μία ὑπόστασις (one hypostasis). Cyril is, therefore, orthodox; however, he must be considered in light of Chalcedon.

The fifth council then by rehabilitating the Cyrillian concept of the unity of subject in Christ, directed its energy to the hypostatic unity of the incarnate Word. Christ’s humanity then is considered fully consubstantial with us. His hypostasis then was the pre-existing and divine Logos. All this is possible when hypostasis retains its “open” character as foundational and not contentful and is not identified with a “simple aspect of the natural existence, human or divine.” (p 85)

Byzantine Christology by Justinian’s time has been criticized for leaving too much of Christ’s psychological life in the dark. Thus, the decisions of the fifith council must be seen as one step along the way in the development of a more robust christology. Significant later developments would be seen especially in St. Maximus’s doctrine of the two wills and his conception of deification. The critics of the fifth council’s christology seem to assert their criticism on the basis of Thomas’ notion of “pure nature” which does not comport with either “the patristic conception of sin or with that of deification.” (p 86)

Human nature, at the contact of God, does not disappear; on the contrary it becomes fully human, for God cannot destroy what he has made. (p 86)

De Sectis, attributed to Leontius of Byzantium between 581 and 607 CE, articulates a consciousness of Christ’s consubstantiality with humanity. Thus, when the scriptures teach that Christ was progessing in age and wisdom (Lk 2:52); this was taken as meaning that he was learning what he did not know, i.e., that he suffered ignorance. Most Byzantine writers have shunned the idea of ignorance in Christ on account of the Greek notion of ignorance that is predicated on sin. Further, a certain philosophy of gnosis made knowledge the demonstration of unfallen nature. “Christ could not be ignorant because he was the new Adam.” For St. Cyril this ignorance was something Christ assumed willingly in the “framework of economy”; however, it was nevertheless a genuine ignorance. Hence, the author of De Sectis was able to draw from the great Alexandrian doctor. (p 87)

Such thinking raised anthropological questions. Was humanity by nature corruptible? If so does this mean that when Christ assumes human nature that he is consequently assuming corruptibility? It was Severus of Antioch, in agreement with Chalcedon and arguing against Julian, who asserted that Adam was incorruptible prior to the Fall only insofar as he participated in the divine incorruptibility. It is in the resurrection then that Christ gives incorruptibility back to human nature (via participation).

It is worth noting that in condemning Julian of Halicarnassus “the Christian East ignored … as a whole the doctrine of original sin ‘of nature’” (p 88), wanting to shield Christ from such a nature. Humanity’s mortality is thought not to be “a state of sin, but a condition of human nature that the Word, by his incarnation, came to assume and, by his resurrection, re-established into the grace of immortality.” (p 88-9)

In conclusion, this shows that fifth century christology, viz. its theopaschite formulae, did not interfere with the reality of Christ’s human nature, wich is also consubstantial with our human nature, being limited, ignorant and corruptible. By confessing “God suffered in the flesh,” one underscores the corruptible state of human nature that Christ came to save by assuming it in the precise condition which Adam’s sin had rendered it.

By way of reminder, I have made some progress on Fr. John Meyendorff’s Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. I invite you to visit the foundational post in this series of chapter summaries of the work and view the Table of Contents, from which you will be able to access the individual chapter summaries and appendages.

With the dangerous lack of coherence in the Chalcedonian apologetics, the debate gravitated towards questions of theopaschism, manifested especially in radical opposition of Chacedonians against the altered Trisagion: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, crucified for us, have mercy on us. This interpolated form was not “formally heretical” because it was addressed to Christ and not the Trinity; however, it had become the rallying cry for the Monophysites. So the polarity of the spectrum of this debate can be articulated like this:

• Monophysites: God was crucified for us.
• Chalcedonians: Only the manhood of the Logos was crucified for us.

This was the same problem that had been debated in the years prior to Ephesus concerning the term θεοτόκος (theotokos - mother of God), referring to Mary. Could the Logos really “be born” of the Virgin? Could God really be the “son of Mary”? Cyril in asserting the full theological validity of θεοτόκος against Nestorius declared in his twelfth anathematism that “the Word had suffered in the flesh”. “At stake were Christ’s identity itself and the nature of the union ‘according to the hypostasis’ defined at Chalcedon.” Since everyone admitted that God was impassible a real distinction had to be achieved between nature and hypostasis (p 70).

St. Gregory Nazianzen had made this pre-Nicene idea integral to his soteriology: “We need a God made in the flesh and put to death (ἐδεήθημεν Θεοῦ σαρκουμένου καί νεκρουμένου) in order that we could live again.” Even the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses a “Son of God”, born “of the Virgin Mary”, and “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate”. It is the confession of Nicaea, with which Cyril was preoccupied, that hinged upon whether or not Mary was the Mother of God or the Word suffered in the flesh.

Meanwhile at Antioch, there were philosophical reservations. While Antioch admitted to Christ’s unity of being, confessed at Chalcedon by the term hypostasis, their difficulty remained in the fact that God who is impassible seemed to have passibility imputed to him. So the question emerged: Did God have to make death his own to vanquish it? While the Antiochene confessed the union of Christ as a doctrine, their inability to admit a distinction between nature and hypostasis resulted in only something, a nature or the flesh, dying on the cross rather than someone, the whole Christ Jesus.

John the Grammarian
John the Grammarian, in his Apology, articulated a defense for the Chalcedonian position. His defense rested on the necessity, acknowledged by the Monophysites, to assert Christ’s double consubstantiality: to the Father and to us. As the argument went, if this double consubstantiality is true in Christ, the result is two natures or substances since “the same nature could not be consubstantial to God and creatures” (p 72). The Grammarian helps us to see that the Chalcedonian definition must be understood in connection with the Cappadocians’ Trinitarian terminology. It is the thought of John the Grammarian that prepared the framework into which Leontius of Byzantium’s christological terminology fit after it had been sifted from its Origenic context.

Leontius of Jerusalem
No progress with the Monophysites was accomplished until the hypostasis of the union of Christ’s natures was identified with pre-existent hypostasis of the Logos. This connection made possible the doctrinal continuity between Cyril and Chalcedon. The chief contributor of this connection was Leontius of Jerusalem (LJ), not to be confused with Leontius of Byzantium, prominent in the previous chapter. While Leontius of Byzantium (LB) confessed multiple pre-existent hypostases of Christ (upto 3) since he refused to identify Christ with the Logos, Leontius of Jerusalem “violently attacked the ontological presuppositions of such a christology” (p 74).

Christ’s humanity, according to LJ, did not possess the hypostasis of normal human beings (body/soul). He insists that Christ’s hypostasis, belonging to the divine Logos, is not “particular” but is instead “common”. Thus Christ unites all humanity and not only a single individual to the divinity. (p 74)

- Christ’s Concrete Humanity
This idea rests on the conception of the imago Dei. St. Gregory of Nyssa saw the imago as belonging not to individuals but to humanity corporately. St. Iranaeus built his doctrine of salvation on the idea of “recapitulation” which was taken up again by Cyril, who asserts, “the incarnate Word ‘possesses us himself, since he took over our nature and made of our body the body of the Word’” (p 75).

The synonymity of “nature” and “hypostasis” in Cyril, coupled with the absence of a stable metaphysical system and the presupposition that individuation was a result of the Fall (Plato) made Cyril’s approach unjustifiable for LJ. It is LJ who argues that Christ has a rational soul contra Cyril’s unwitting Apollonarian assertion of the relationship between the two substances of Christ’s humanity.

LJ runs amuck on the shores of incoherence because he is unable to conceive a metaphysical definition of the hypostasis. Since Chalcedon distinguishes between nature and hypostasis in christology, it has become natural to apply to the theology of the incarnation the concepts that the Cappadocian Fathers used to express the mystery of the Trinity. If one takes hypostasis as “existence” as LJ did, then the Trinity is reduced to three gods. On the other hand, if one follows Thomas Aquinas in saying that the hypostases are but “relations”within the divine essence, then the theopaschite position of Cyril must be interpreted as applying to the divine nature itself.

Neither the Trinity or the Incarnation can be defined in the economies of Plato or Aristotle, in which the abstract and concrete stand in opposition to one another. According to the Cappadocians hypostasis cannot be reduced to the “particular” or “relation”. Rather, while not being predicated on nature, it is the principle of the nature’s existence.

This conception assumes that God, as personal being, is not totally bound to his own nature; the hypostatic existence is flexible, “open”; it admits the possibility of divine acts outside of the nature (energies) and implies that God can personally and freely assume a fully human existence while remaining God, whose nature remains completely transcendent. (p 77)

In this way, the Word remains impassible in his divine nature, but suffers in his human nature.

The Letter to Menas and the anathematisms of the fifth council do not always resonate with what we know to be true of Origen. Their objections focus on the περί ἀρχῶν mainly. Origen was inclined to remain quiet on some of his more dubious positions in his other works (viz., Commentaries). Further, some of the doctrines condemned have no parallel in the known writings of Origen.

Origen or Evagrius?
Anathematisms 6-9, 12 and 13 of the fifth council were concerned with a dualistic conception of Christ which distinguished Christ from the Logos. This distinction was not to be supported by the basic doctrine of the περί ἀρχῶν. The assembly’s target then was not a straw-man of Origen; rather, it focused on the genuine doctrines of “one of the spiritual masters of Eastern monasticism, Evagrius.

For Evagrius, Christ was an immaterial intellect (νους - nous) who did not Fall (in the Platonic sense) and consequently did not materialize. Therefore, writes Meyendorff:

There was … no incarnation of the Word. There was an abasement of the νους-Christ for the salvation of all creatures, in the various degrees of their fallen existence, in order to restore them to their primitive unity (p 55).

Christ then can be called Logos only because of his - Christ’s - union to the Logos (a separate entity in Evagrius’ thought) from before all world. This thinking obfuscated the doctrine of the Trinity that the Cappadocian fathers had given to the Church as well as presented a Christ that was something other than the Christ of Scripture.

Whoever says that it is not the God-Logos…, one of the holy Trinity, who is properly Christ, but that he is so by catachresis, because, they say, of the mind which stooped (διά τόν κενώσαντα εαθτόν νουν), being attached to the God-Logos himself (συνημμένον αὐτῷ τῷ θεῷ Λόγῳ), and which is properly called Christ, but whoever says that the Logos is called Christ because of the mind and that the mind is called God because of the Logos, be he anathema (Anathema 8).

Compare the above anathematism with this excerpt from Evagrius:

Christ is not the Word at the beginning, so that he who has been anointed is not God at the beginning, but that one, because of this one, is Christ, and this one, because of that one, is God….(p 55-6).

“After reading the fifteen anathematisms, one cannot help wondering how the notion, spread by Harnack, that Byzantine Christianity was Hellenized Christianity can have been so popular” (p 57). O. Cullmann has articulated that biblical time is an [eschatologically oriented] ascending line, while for Hellenism, it is the circle. Consequently, Greeks could not conceive of a deliverance that resulted from divine action within temporal history.

Justinian argued that on account of Origen’s education in the mythology of the Greeks, he merely posed as exegete of the Scriptures, while he expounded the doctrines of Plato (p 57). Consequently, the circular notion of time and its succession of falls necessary to return to the primitive natural state implied a determinism that made redemption unnecessary.

Evagrius’ condemnation was also monumental because he was one of the most widely read authors in Eastern monasteries. Even the most fierce of anti-Origenists like St. Barsanuphius, while officially condemning Evagrian doctrines as “Hellenistic myths” admitted that the soul could find useful teaching in the ‘purely spiritual’ and ‘non-dogmatic’ aspects of his work. Evagrius’ work On Prayer continued under the borrowed name of St. Nilus.

The Evagrian conception of perfection as gnosis and of prayer as an activity “proper to the mind” was linked to his platonic anthropology. Thus, the Incarnation has no place in Evagrius whose spiritual goal was to hold oneself as immaterial before the Immaterial. Evagrius was the originator of the monologic prayer and consequently it became the center of Byzantine monastic life. St. John Climacus and St. Maximus the Confessor would take over his teachings at this point. The “intellectual prayer” in the different context of union with God [i.e., per Incarnation] became in the Byzantine tradition the “Jesus Prayer” (p 60).

Interestingly, it is Evagrius’ master, St. Macarius who provides the corrective for Evagrian anthropology. St. Macarius presents the human being as a psychosomatic composite (psyche = soul, soma = body, hence human being = soul + body where the Greek formula might look like this: human being = soul - body). The result of this corrective is 1) the Incarnation is no longer excluded 2) spiritual life is not reduced to dematerialization of the intellect and 3) the center of spiritual life is union with Christ.

Leontius of Byzantium
A transitional figure between Evagrius and St. Maximus was the Origenist Leontius of Byzantium (not to be confused with Leontius of Jerusalem). Leontius sought to offer his solution to the contemporary Christological problem that divided Monophysites and Chalcedonians. His two major contributions to Christology are reflected in the essential christological definition:

1. A comparison between the two natures in Christ and the union of the body and soul in a human being.
2. The definition of the union of the divinity and humanity in Christ as an ‘essential union’ (ἕνωσις κατ’ οὐσίαν).

As with many writers of substance, what is not written is as important as what is written. Leontius never designates the Logos as the subject of the union, which is always Christ. This distinction, carried over from Origen and Evagrius, is apparent in the way that Leontius deals with Christ’s death, in which Christ suffered in the flesh by the will of the Logos (p 64).

Such an ontology (Evagrian) required that Leontius create a new system of metaphysical thought. Such an endeavor ended up conflating and/or confusing nature (φύσις) and substance (οὐσία). His articulation seemed to lead to the conclusion that there were different species of Christs and that the Christ only possessed one nature.

In light of these problems, Leontius gives us the term enhypostaton as a major contribution to christology. It is this new notion of the existence “within something” that allows Leontius to deal with the notion of “no nature without hypostasis” that the Nestorians and Eutychians both admitted. However, Leontius makes clear that enhypostaton is not identical with hypostasis and in this way Leontius’ vocabulary strays from the Trinitarian vocabulary given by the Cappadocians.

It was when Leontius’ notion was taken into a context that viewed Christ as identical with the Logos, being pre-existent and having assumed a human nature (enhypostaton), and when it was seen that the duality of natures does not obfuscate the unity of the subject in Christ, then Leontius “true contribution” took its place in the history of Christology (p 68).

[ This is the third of eleven chapters out of John Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. You may also wish to see the post Snapshot of Origen. ]

Origen’s [c.a. 182 - 251 CE] personality and ideas have always been the source of passionate controversies. Condemned in his lifetime by his bishop, supported by numerous disciples, he was attacked again in the fourth century by St. Epiphanius and condemned in 400 by a council presided over by Theophilus of Alexandria. The role played by St. Jerome and Rufinus of Aquileia in the Origenist quarrels of that time are also well known. The same quarrels were used as an excuse for the deposition of St. John Chrysostom. (p 47)

In the vein of this legacy, Justinian (483 to 565 CE), the emperor in the Roman empire’s east, issued his edict against the Originests in 543 due to the wide influence that the problematic doctrines Origenism were having broadly. As Theophilus of Alexandria tells us that for the Origenists the Divine Logos had not assumed a human body nor was the Logos to be identified with the Christ, which was the divine soul that assumed a human body (p 47-8). This distinction between Christ and the Logos smacked of the Nestorian distinction between the Word and the ‘assumed man’.

The question of whether the followers of Origen were representative of what Origen himself taught begins to surface at this point. The question seems to pivot around Origen’s περί ἀρχῶν (On First Principles, De principiis). In this work Meyendorf argues that problems with anthropology, cosmology and eschatology are indigenous to Origen. However, even this evidence is insufficient to explain the fate of Origenism in the Christian Tradition (p 49).

The ideas of Evagrius, one of Origen’s most prominent fourth century interpreters, were passionately debated in the sixth century CE. The seat of Origenism at this time was in the Great Lavra of St. Sabbas in Palestine; however, in nearby Egypt the views had been condemned since 400 CE. These Origenist traditions significantly influenced the essentially popular movement of monasticism, which originally sought to express the eschatological nature of Christianity. It made monasiticsm more intelligible to the Hellenistic world while at the same time modifying monasticism with Platonic dualism. It would seem that different facets of monastic asceticism sought to purify the flesh in preparation for the resurrection of the dead, anticipating the realities of the Kingdom to come. “The linear perspective of biblical spirituality seeking the kingdom to come was thus replaced by a vertical perspective, the search for dematerialization.

While several modern historians (e.g., de Lubac, Daniélou, Bertrand) attempting to redeem Origen, the περί ἀρχῶν and many exegetical passages remain to underscore that Origen was working from a framework of Platonic monism. In the Gnostic Chapters Evagrius makes plain the origin of the doctrines condemned by the fifth council. In other words, in additions to Origen’s problematic anthropology, cosmology and eschatology, Evagrius’ Christology presents itself as the fourth pillar in the controversy that would be condemned.

Justinian describes these sixth century doctrinal problems in two letters: 1) the Letter to Menas and 2) the letter to the council of 553. The Letter to Menas produced ten anathematisms against the Palestinian controversies (Origenism per Evagrius). The letter to the council of 553 contained the essentials of the decisions that the assembly ratified, producing fifteen anathematisms.

Justinians attacks on Origenism began by bringing suspicion to Origen’s Trinitarian subordinationism, which itself stemmed from a presupposition that Creation was co-eternal with God excluding the distinction, established by post Nicene theology, between the generation of the Son and the creation of the world in time (p 52).

Regarding the eternality of creation, Origen articulates in περί ἀρχῶν that God created a succession of worlds in which there was an eternal intellectual unity. The individuation and materialization of minds happens then by virtue of their free will and the “fall”. His notion of what we would today call “Redemption” is that of ἀποκατάστασις (apokatastasis) in which we are finally freed from the prison of our body and subsummed into the intellectual unity. Origen taught that Satan would have a place as a spiritual creature of God in the restored intellectual universe. The council and Justinian would have none of this:

Whoever says that the life of the spirits will be analogous to the life which existed at the beginning, when the spirits were not yet fallen and lost, so that the end and the beginning are similar, and that the end will be the true measure of the beginning, be he anathema (Anathema 15).