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

Relevant links:
John Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought.

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)