Nielsen’s Nook

The Spiritual Writers: Salvation, Asceticism, and Deification (1 of 2)

Relevant links: John Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought.
  1. Christological Crisis
  2. Origenism
  3. Integration of neo-Platonic thought
  1. Salvation of humanity
  2. Humanity's relationship with God
  3. Humanity's final destiny
  1. Image of God in humanity and the destiny of that image
  2. Original Sin
  3. Redemption
consensus patrum
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)
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)