God And Humanity

If the biblical idea of "in the image and likeness of God" is fundamental for a Christian anthropology, it must be said most paradoxically that it is again decisive for an atheistic anthropology. Actually, the resemblance between God and man has never been denied by atheism. For Nicholas Hartmann, Feuerbach or Karl Marx, the human person is defined by attributes which are properly divine: intelligence, freedom, creativity, prophetic clairvoyance. For Sartre, man is essentially "project," thus freedom, which means that his existence both precedes and surpasses his essence. St Gregory Palamas affirmed precisely this on the subject of God: "I am the One who is, for I am the One who embrace in myself all being."

In The Faith of an Unbeliever, F. Jeanson affirms: "The universe is a machine for making gods...the human species is capable of incarnating God and making him real." For Heidegger, more the pessimist, man is a "powerless god," the god only of himself. Everywhere we think of ourselves in relation to the Absolute. To understand man is to decipher this relationship. Both believers and atheists are able to advance to this same point, namely that the problem of man is one that is both divine and human. God is the archetype, the limiting ideal of the human self. Certainly, the human person bears within himself something of the absolute. In his own way he exists en soi and pour soi, in and for himself, and Sartre's entire philosophical system pivots on this. Therefore, God and man resemble each other. Neither the Greek poets, nor the skeptic Xenophanes, nor Feuerbach and Freud have ever denied this. For all the questions, the basic one is really knowing who is the creator of the other, God or man.

The atheist vision possesses a singular methodological significance. In reality, atheists identify God and man and do not pause before the enormity of such an identification. It is necessary to admit that they are infinitely more consistent than are Christians, faced with the affirmations of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church, which are no less astonishing.

The thinking of the Fathers goes back to the relation between God and his creation. The biblical idea of the "resemblance" is what makes revelation possible in the first place. If God the Word is this Word that the Father addresses to man, his child, then there is a certain conformity, a correspondence between the Logos who is divine and the logos who is human. This is the ontological foundation of all human knowledge. The laws of nature are proposed by the divine Architect. God is the creator, poet or maker of the universe and man, who resembles him, is also creator and poet in his own way. St Gregory Palamas makes this more precise: "God transcendent of everything, incomprehensible, unspeakable, consents to become a participant in our intelligence." What is more, Clement of Alexandria says: "Man is like God because God is like man." God forms the human being observing, in his Wisdom, the heavenly humanity of Christ (see Col. 1:15,1 Cor 15:47, Jn 3:13). This is predestined "to reunite all things, those that are in heaven with those on earth" (Eph 1:10), the "mystery hidden in God before all ages" (i Cor 2:7). We are created in the image of God in view of the Incarnation, placed in this state because it implies the ultimate degree of communion between God and man. The icon of the Theotokos, the Mother of God (especially that called Eleousa, Umilenie—tenderness) holding the child Jesus, admirably expresses this. If God was born in man (the Nativity) there is also a birth of man in God (the Ascension).

It is necessary to be attentive to this vision of the Fathers, the deification of mankind is a function, a result of the humanization of God: "Man is the human face of God," said St Gregory of Nyssa. This is why "man, destined for the enjoyment of things divine, ought to receive in his very nature a relationship, a kinship with God, with whom he ought to share." The human soul is not fulfilled except in the "divine milieu." "To contemplate God is the soul's very life," says St Gregory of Nyssa.

The Fathers build their anthropology on the divine level, and their perspectives are incisive, paradoxical, bold in the extreme. It will suffice, at some small risk, to select but a few of their most astonishing and well-known theses:

"God became man so that man might become God by grace and share in the divine life."

"Man is a being who has received the command to become God."

"Man must unite created nature and uncreated divine energy."

"I am human by nature and God by grace."

"The one who shares the divine light becomes himself a sort of light."

A microcosm, man is also microtheos, a. "little God." It is in our very structure that we bear the theological enigma, that we are mysterious beings, what St Peter calls "man, hidden in the depth of the heart" (i Pet 3:4). This is an apophatic definition and one which shows the Fathers' interest in the content of the imago Dei, the image of God in man. For St Gregory of Nyssa, the richness of the image reflects divine perfection, the convergence of all good things, and underscores the human power, properly divine, to freely determine himself.

When we say, "I exist," something of the absoluteness of God is translated into the human: "I am the One who is." For the Fathers these formulas were "essential words," words of life received and experienced. Sadly, in history, these lofty summits of experience and expression experienced a fall toward the flatness of scholastic theology, where these images of fire became clichés without life, common places where this or that theological position was reinforced, cerebral, abstract, polemical, without any revolutionary or cataclysmic power any longer for the life of the world.

Within current piety, asceticism poorly understood becomes obscurantism. Humility becomes formalized and a passport of good orthodoxy leading to an orthodox Barthianism, where man reduced to something insignificant is able to do nothing except to revolt and negate himself. Monophysitism has never been surpassed in certain currents of piety, taking the form of the "transcendent egoism" of individual salvation. It is the monophysite contempt for the flesh and for the material world, the flight toward the celestial realm of pure spirits, the misunderstanding of culture and of the human vocation or callings in the world, a hostility even a hatred for woman and beauty. According to Nicholas Cabasilas, God's "foolish love" (manikos eras) for us or in the magnificent words of St Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow: "The Father is the Love which crucifies, the Son is crucified Love and the Spirit is the invincible power of the Cross. This religion of crucified Love has been the victim of widespread alienation. It has been transformed into a religion of paternalistic clericalism, or one of a "sadistic Father" (the juridical theory of satisfaction, the Son "satisfies justice," "quenches the Father's anger"), or a religion of law and of punishment, of obsession with hell, a "terrorist" religion where the Gospel is reduced to a purely moralistic system. Again in the nineteenth century according to the then prevalent theology, the "rich" represented divine Providence, and the "poor" blessed God for having sent into the world such worthy, affluent people. When one considers wealth and poverty as divine institutions, one is only able to oscillate between the Father as fearful tyrant and the Father as the generous and reassuring patriarch.

Now authentic Christian Tradition teaches an authentic dialectical tension, so powerfully stressed by St Gregory Palamas: not by one thing or the other, but by the one and the other at the same time. It is the tension between subjective humility and the objective fact of being co-liturgist, co-creator, co-poet with God. It is necessary to relearn these antinomies, formerly so familiar to the Fathers and to the Church, now foreign to us.

We say, "I am imperfect," and God responds, "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). We say, "I am dust and nothing," and Christ says to us, "You are like gods and my friends" (Jn 15:14). "You are children of God" (Acts 17:28) affirms St Paul, and St John, "You have received the anointing and you know everything" (i Jn 2:27). "I bear the marks of my sins but I am in the image of your unspeakable glory" we hear in one of the troparia of the Orthodox funeral service.

Man is created and nevertheless not created but "born of water and the Holy Spirit." We are of the earth and also of heaven, creatures yet God-in-becoming. A "created god" is a most paradoxical notion, just as a "created person" and "created freedom." The Fathers' boldness deepened these maxims and sayings so that we might "not at all be saddened" and not "stifle the Holy Spirit."

Certainly the Eastern Church's understanding of theosis that is, "deification" or "divinization," is not a logical solution nor a concept but a solution of life and grace, an antinomic solution, as is every charism of the Holy Spirit which leads us back to the antinomy of God himself. The Fathers recognized this in saying that the Name of God is relative with respect to the world. How is God able to be, at one and the same time, relative and absolute, the God of history and the God in history? This is a mystery of Christ, of his Love, which transcending his own absoluteness, is leading us toward the Father. How also can the saying of St Ephrem the Syrian be true: "The whole Church is one of penitents and those who are perishing?" How is this statement able to agree with that of St Simeon the New Theologian: "Truly it is a great mystery, God among men, God in the midst of gods, by deification!" But this is one and the same mystery.

From: In The World, Of The Church, by Paul Evdokimov, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 2001