Jesus Christ

BYZANTINE CHRISTOLOGY has always been dominated by the categories of thought and the terminology of the great controversies of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries about the person and identity of Jesus Christ. These controversies involved conceptual problems, as well as the theological basis of life. In the mind of Eastern Christians, the entire content of the Christian faith depends upon the way in which the question "Who is Jesus Christ?" is answered.

The five ecumenical councils which issued specific definitions on the relationship between the divine and the human natures in Christ have at times been viewed as a pendulant development: from the emphasis on the divinity of Christ, at Ephesus (431); to the reaffirmation of His full humanity, at Chalcedon (451); then back to His divinity, with the acceptance of Cyril's idea of Theopaschism, at Constantinople (553); followed by a new awareness of His human "energy" or "will," again at Constantinople (680), and of His human quality of describability in the anti-iconoclastic definition of Nicaea n (787). Still, the opinion is often expressed in Western theological literature that Byzantine Christology is crypto-Monophysite, and offered as an explanation for the lack of concern among Eastern Christians for man in his secular or social creativity.

1. GOD AND MAN

To affirm that God became man, and that His humanity possesses all the characteristics proper to human nature, implies that the Incarnation is a cosmic event. Man was created as the master of the cosmos and called by the creator to draw all creation to God. His failure to do so was a cosmic catastrophe, which could be repaired only by the creator Himself. Moreover, the fact of the Incarnation implies that the bond between God and man, which has been expressed in the Biblical concept of "image and likeness," is unbreakable. The restoration of creation is a "new creation," but it does not establish a new pattern, so far as man is concerned; it reinstates man in his original divine glory among creatures and in his original responsibility for the world. It reaffirms that man is truly man when he participates in the life of God; that he is not autonomous, either in relation to God, or in relation to the world; that true human life can never be "secular." In Jesus Christ, God and man are one; in Him, therefore, God becomes accessible not by superseding or eliminating the hu-manity, but by realizing and manifesting humanity in its purest and most authentic form.

2. REDEMPTION AND DEIFICATION

The Chalcedonian definition proclaimed that Christ is consubstantial, not only with His Father, but also "with us." Though fully man, Christ does not possess a human hypostasis, for the hypostasis of His two natures is the divine hypostasis of the Logos. Each human individual, fully "consubstantial" with his fellow men, is, nonetheless, radically distinct from them in his unique, unrepeatable, and unassimilable personality or hypostasis: no man can fully be in another man. But Jesus' hypostasis has a fundamental affinity with all human personalities: that of being their model. For indeed all men are created according to the image of God, i.e., according to the image of the Logos. When the Logos became incarnate, the divine stamp matched all its imprints: God assumed humanity in a way which did not exclude any human hypostasis, but which opened to all of them the possibility of restoring their unity in Himself. He became, indeed, the "new Adam," in whom every man finds his own nature realized perfectly and fully, without the limitations which would have been inevitable if Jesus were only a human personality.

3. THE THEOTOKOS

The only doctrinal definition on Mary to which the Byzantine Church was formally committed is the decree of the Council of Ephesus which called her the Theotokos, or "Mother of God." Obviously Christological, and not Mariological, the decree nevertheless corresponds to the Mariological theme of the "New Eve," which has appeared in Christian theological literature since the second century and which testifies, in the light of the Eastern view on the Adamic inheritance, to a concept of human freedom more optimistic than that which prevailed in the West.

But it is the theology of Cyril of Alexandria, affirming the personal, hypostatic identity of Jesus with the pre-existent Logos, as it was endorsed in Ephesus, which served as the Christological basis for the tremendous development of piety centered on the person of Mary after the fifth century. God became our Savior by becoming man; but this "humanization" of God came about through Mary, who is thus inseparable from the person and work of her Son. Since in Jesus there is no human hypostasis, and since a mother can be mother only of "someone," not of something, Mary is indeed the mother of the incarnate Logos, the "Mother of God." And since the deification of man takes place "in Christ," she is also - in a sense just as real as man's participation "in Christ" - the mother of the whole body of the Church.

From: Byzantine Theology by John Meyendorff, Fordham University Press, New York, NY, 1979