Second section

Divine incarnation

Chrysostom said of Jesus that he is “closer to us than the body is to the head” (Homily 49:3 on John).
Nicholas Cabazilas said that he is “closer to us than our own soul” (Min 150:712).

1 - Introduction

After generations and generations of the Old Testament people being freed from pagan ideas, and being established in the belief in the unity of God, in the transcendence of God from matter and limitation, and in the belief that God is an infinite and all-powerful spirit, the course of thought and history was broken by a new miracle from the wonders of heaven: an angel in Nazareth announcing to Mary, the most pure and holy, the new Eve, that God was coming into the world through her.

Before her, God had chosen many of the chosen people, bestowing blessings upon them and entrusting them with divine tasks. But the fullness of time and the completion of purity and holiness were not achieved except in the chosen girl, the Virgin Mary: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman.” (1).

Who is Mary? We do not know the exact history of her life. But the angel’s announcement and God’s choice of her as the mother of his beloved son Jesus indicate her sublime essence.

What was she doing when the angel entered? What state was she in? Was she praying? Was she in a state of spiritual rapture? We don’t know for sure. But she was definitely at the peak of her closeness to God.

How did you meet the angel? The account of the Evangelist Luke (2) It indicates that the depth of her humility was surprised by peace and good news and that she was afraid. The incarnation was not a forced act but rather her voluntary acceptance. Therefore, the angel’s conversation with her progressed towards her answer: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” (3).

She asked the angel how she could conceive, because she was surprised to become pregnant when she had decided to live a perpetual virginity. The angel reassured her that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” (4).

God offers Mary, through the angel, that the Son of God may take flesh from her body, from her womb as a repository for Him, for He whom the heavens and the earth cannot contain.

And the course of history stopped for a moment: either Mary would respond on behalf of humanity with a yes or she would respond with a no.

Mary's pure conscience had to resolve the situation, so Mary chose to please God and save mankind.

She is our firstfruits, our offering to God. Through her, heaven became earth and earth became heaven, so her womb became “more spacious than the heavens,” and “a mental paradise appeared in which is the divine plantation from which we eat and live and not die like Adam.”

Before God’s offer, Mary’s response was: “Here I am, the handmaid of the Lord.” She is a servant, a handmaid of the Lord, ready to accept His will and carry out His will. “Here I am” is present and ready, offering herself to the Lord, surrendering to His desire, accepting His plan for the salvation of human beings: “Let it be done to me according to your word.” I want what God wants to be done.

At this moment, after this decisive answer, the secret hidden since the ages was fulfilled, the secret of the union of God and man. The Son of God was united with man and the incarnation of the Word took place: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (5).

So what is the secret of the incarnation? It is the secret of the conception of the Son of God in the womb of the Virgin, and that is that the Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity, joined to his person our human nature which he carved for himself from the all-pure Mary. “For us humans and for our salvation.”

The Creed has defined these two reasons and the Fourth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils have repeated them: “for us men,” and “for our salvation.”

Adam sinned in Paradise, departed from God, and was expelled from the Garden. At a time when his natural powers were good and directed toward God, he chose disobedience and evil, so dissolution and corruption entered his will, and God’s judgment of spiritual death was carried out upon him, so physical death and decay were the result of his spiritual death. (6).

God said to him: “On the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” (7). The immediate death was spiritual. So (then after a long old age the known death occurred) and corruption passed to us (8).

But the love of God, which surpasses all reason and understanding, and which every heart and tongue cannot praise, thank, and be humbled before, did not want us to perish and remain far from it until the end, and for death and the abyss to swallow up the children of men without hope. (9).

Therefore the Holy Trinity was pleased, in the abundance of His mercies, to show at the appointed time what He had willed before the ages for us and for our salvation, to restore us to union with Him and make us partakers of the divine nature. (10).

Then he sent the second person, the beloved Son, the eternal Word of God, “the Lamb slain before the ages,” who, being in the form of God, emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and being made in the likeness of men and existing as men in appearance, and humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (11)This submission to the divine will, this emptying, led the Lord Jesus to become the “Man of Sorrows.” (12) For our sake, he suffers everything that Adam's fall brought upon us, except sin.

The human nature that He took upon Himself is capable of suffering what we suffer because of the fall, for He subjected it to that for our sake, so before the resurrection there was in Him the capacity for decay and pain that He wanted out of love for us.

His divine light was hidden except on the day of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, although his divine light was always present in his body. (13)Since the defect that afflicted Adam created three barriers between us and God: nature, sin, and death, Christ overcame them one by one. He overcame nature through His incarnation, which united humanity with divinity, and overcame sin through His death, and overcame death, the last of the enemies, through His resurrection. (14)The important stage was the incarnation. When God passed this stage, the last two victories became guaranteed and natural and inevitable.

“Since the Word took on flesh, all the poison of the serpent has been extinguished in Him (in the flesh)… and at the same time, death as a result of sin has been wiped out,” says St. Athanasius. (15) Our Orthodox theology emphasizes the incarnation a lot.

The incarnation was a measure issued by God’s will, not by His essence. Therefore, the essence of God did not undergo any change because of the incarnation. The divinity of the Trinity, including the divinity of the Son, remained the same as it was before the incarnation. (16).

For with God there is no change or shadow of turning. He is the same from eternity to eternity. As for the incarnation, God intended to save us, to restore us and to unite us with Himself.

In our Orthodox theology (which agrees with the teachings of the Church Fathers) (17) Salvation shows a negative action such as rescue from something. (18) The incarnation goes beyond that to appear as a special act in which God united with man.

We strongly affirm that God became man so that man could become God since Saint Irenaeus (second century) and even since Pentecost and with Peter (1 Peter 1:4) and Ignatius of Antioch until this day. (19)In the Church Fathers’ defense against Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism (one nature) and Monothelitism (one will), the main argument was that our deification, sanctification, salvation and becoming adopted children of God are matters that cannot be accomplished through Jesus Christ unless Jesus is a perfect mediator who unites all divinity and all humanity in the unity of the hypostasis. (20)Saint Maximus the Confessor expressed this doctrine of the Fathers in the best way, as he considered the incarnation to be equivalent to the act of our deification. He said, “The incarnation makes man God in the same measure as God became man.” (21), we turn (22)A kind of equilibrium is established between our being and Christ. (23)Jesus is fully God and fully man in two natures united in one person.

This belief is clear in the divine book and the history of the church.

2- Historical overview (24)

Christianity emerged in a unified, pure environment and later spread in a pagan environment that contributed to the Eastern, Greek and Roman civilizations, clashing with the Jewish mentality on the one hand and with the Greek religious and philosophical doctrines on the other.

Heresies denying the divinity of Christ (the Ebionites) and denying his true human nature (the Docetists) appeared since the apostolic era.

John the Evangelist struggled against this, then Saint Ignatius of Antioch, then the fathers of the second century until Arius appeared in the fourth century, when the heresy took on unprecedented expansion and methods. Arius denied the divinity of the Son. (25) He said that the Word of God replaced the human spirit. Thus, Jesus is not equal to the Father or to us.

The Church adhered to its belief that God is one in essence and triune in persons, that is, according to persons.

Some have argued that Jesus was a dual person. In 352 (according to Litzmann and 360 according to others), Apollinarius, Bishop of Laodicea, responded with his heresy that Jesus was a perfect God united with an animal body and soul, so that the Word of God took the place of the Spirit. (26).

At that time, the great scholars of the faith hastened to refute his statements and clarify the Church’s teaching on the incarnation and the two natures of Christ and their union. His teaching was condemned by Athanasius the Great through the Council of Alexandria in 362, and Saint Basil disowned him. The two Gregorians took up the struggle and clarified the doctrine, and the two letters of Gregory the Theologian to Cledonius were: A beacon that illuminated the church Even the Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon) in which she played a prominent role. He made his famous statement, “Unless he (the Son) took on himself, he would not be saved.” (27).

This means that Christ took on a complete human nature with a rational soul: “Sin is the work of the soul. Therefore, it was necessary to heal the soul in the incarnation.”

For the body without the soul cannot sin. Any diminution of human nature in Christ renders salvation and deification incomplete and the encounter between God and man incomplete.

Therefore, the Church Fathers emphasized the completeness of human nature in Christ. If the soul, mind, or will (i.e. the will) were lost, man’s encounter with God would be incomplete.

Man, in his entirety, had to meet God, in his entirety, in a harmonious unity, in order for reconciliation between God and man to be achieved.

If nature is deficient or lacks will or action, man is in an imperfect position with God.

In reaction to Apollinarius, Diodorus, Bishop of Tarsis (Syria), head of the Antiochian school, Theodorus, Bishop of Mopsuestia (Mopsuestia), and Nestorius went too far in their resistance to Apollinarianism, emphasizing the completeness of human nature to the point of making it a hypostasis. When Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, dared to protect his Antiochian priest Anastasius, who attacked the designation of Our Lady Mary as the Mother of God, a new theological battle began, which ended with the victory of Saint Cyril of Alexandria (the Third Ecumenical Council in 431) and his reconciliation with John, Patriarch of Antioch in 433.

But the problem broke out again when the monk Eutyches (Eutyches) began to learn about the mixture of the two natures. Events developed and personal issues played their role as they had played before since the heresy of Arius.

Dioscorus, Patriarch of Alexandria, adopted Eutyches and disagreed with Saint Leo, Pope of Rome, and Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople.

Things developed badly until the year 451, when the Fourth Ecumenical Council was held in October. Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople, acknowledged on 22/10/451 that there was no doctrinal disagreement with Dioscorus. But personal differences played a role in the division. Dioscorus was not a Eutyches. (28)

The aforementioned Fourth Council finally defined the doctrine of the hypostasis and the two natures, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council completed the definition.

The dispute against Nestorius was over the issue of the two natures of Christ and the manner of their union. Nestorianism says, “There are two natures, two hypostases, one person of sonship, one will, and one authority.” It makes the union between the two hypostases a moral, not a real, bond that takes place in the person alone, not in the hypostasis.

It establishes a difference between the person and the hypostasis that permits the secondary nature of the union and thus its weakness.

The infidel Eutyches say that the two natures are mixed.

The proponents of the One Nature (the Aqat, the Syriacs, the Armenians, and the Ethiopians) say that there are two natures united in one nature in which all human or human qualities and characteristics and all divine qualities and characteristics are combined without mixing, without change, and without transformation. And the hypostasis is one, which is the hypostasis of the incarnate Word of God.

They do not believe in one purely divine nature as is rumored about them, but in one divine nature with the attributes of divinity. (29) And humanity.

Their belief is fundamentally correct, and their disagreement with us is “just a disagreement in expression.” (30)Its origin is the adherence to the literal meaning of some of the expressions of Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the lack of attention to the letter of reconciliation between him and John of Antioch. The Fourth Council of Chalcedon reconciled the Alexandrian and Antiochian theological expressions, and defined the word Physis. By nature without hypostasis (31).

They still take the word “Physis” to mean hypostasis. (32)The history of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries is full of bitter disputes over our most important theological terms. (33).

(1) Galatians 4:4.

(2) Luke 1:26-39.

(3) Luke 1:38

(4) 1: 35

(5) John 1:14

(6) See “The consequences of serious sinAndComparative theology on the consequences and transmission of serious sin“….(network)

(7) Genesis 2:17 and also 3:3

(8) See the teaching of the Fathers in Meyendorff, pp. 181-185, “Introduction to the Study of Gregory Palamas” (French), and in chapter 4 of this book. Maximus has precise and difficult analyses of nature, will, and hypostasis, which we have ignored here.

(9) See (Salvation between the Orthodox Patristic Concept and the Heresies Influenced by “Anselm, Luther and Calvin”)… (network)

(10) 1 Peter 1:4

(11) Philippians 2:6-8. In the Christmas Eve Canon, the passages speak of suffering as an expression of our faith in the Lamb slain before the ages, and of the connection between the incarnation and birth and suffering, and of Jesus being a man of sorrows, sufferings and emptiness from his birth.

(12) Isaiah 53:3.

(13) Maximus the Confessor in Loski pp. 144-145 and Damascene 3:25.

(14) Nicholas Cabazilas: Life in Christ Chapter 3 and also Damascene 4:13 and 1 Corinthians 15.

(15) Men 26:296 These ideas are also evident in his book On the Incarnation.

(16) Loski: 134 and its sources.

(17) Our Orthodox theology is the theology and teaching of the Fathers, and not just in agreement with them… The purpose of the deacon putting the phrase “in agreement with the teachings of the Church Fathers” in parentheses is to say this. (Al-Shabaka)

(18) Loski: 131

(19) See the sources in our article on the Theophany on pp. 76 and 77 of the April 1979 issue of “An-Nour” magazine. The deification of human nature and our deification do not mean the transformation of our essence into a divine essence, but rather the penetration of divine energies into human nature. Our Orthodox theology distinguishes between the essence of God and the divine energies.

(20) Irenaeus Against Heresies in Maine 7:937, 1074-1102/1121 – Hippolytus, Maine 10:732, 870 – Athanasius the Great, Maine 26:96, 293-296, 273, 393 – Cyril of Jerusalem, Homilies 12:1, 13, 14, 16 – Gregory of Nyssa, Maine 45:8, 1152, 1157, 1252 – Damasus, Pope of Rome, Latin Maine 13:353, 353 – Cyril of Alexandria in several places including: Maine 74:564-557 – Leontius of Byzantium 86:1268, 1324-1325, 1348, 1325 – Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Maine 87: 3162 - Al-Dimashqi, Min 95: 161. See also Dictionary of Spirituality 3: 1376-1398.

(21) Maximus, Min 90:1204

(22) 280-281.

(23) 324 and 340.

(24) Review of general references in general history, history of beliefs, and history of Christian literature by Dr. Asad Rustum.

(25) That is, he denied the equality of the Son’s divinity with the Father’s divinity… (the network)

(26) nous in Greek. [“with an animal body and soul” i.e. without a soul… (network)]

(27) The Epistle to Cledonius. Cyril took it from him, as will be shown.

(28) See footnotes 3 and 5 in “1:4 – The Fourth Ecumenical Council and its Results (Eutyches and Dioscorus)” of this book… (Network)

(29) Deacon Espero, the author of the book, says 25 years after the date of this book, in the book You Asked Me, I Answered You, p. 311: “The divine nature of Jesus is the nature of the Father, so it cannot become an attribute”… (Al-Shabaka)

(30) On the authority of Archdeacon Wahib Atallah Girgis: “The Teaching of the Church of Alexandria Concerning the Nature of Jesus Christ, pp. 15-20 and 36, Cairo, 1961.” However, we are surprised by his statement: “We do not dare to say that he is both God and man” (p. 15), although the message of reconciliation is clear, as are the fathers of the Alexandrian School, including Cyril, as will come. The author later insists on attributing the phrase “one incarnate nature” to Athanasius and Cyril, although criticism has proven that it belongs to Apollinarius, so it was slipped in under a pseudonym.

(31) We would like to point out again that when Deacon Aspiro wrote this book, our Orthodox Church was living in an atmosphere in which it hoped that the non-Chalcedonian churches would return to communion with the Orthodox Church, in light of what happened during the reign of His Holiness Pope Kyrollos VI. In light of this general atmosphere, Deacon Aspiro wrote his book, and he did not discuss matters of comparative theology. Although he hinted that their faith was wrong when he said, “A divine nature with the attributes of divinity and humanity.” We add that “Archdeacon Wahib Atallah Girgis” later became a bishop of education in the Coptic Church under the name “Anba Gregorius.” We had a small research in the forum about the teaching of the Coptic Church regarding its Christology, in the teaching of Anba Gregorius, which we hope you will review. here...(network)

(32) This is clear on pages 15, 18 and 36 of the previous reference.

(33) review:

Prestige: God in the Patrisite thought.

Any extended history of doctrine or of the Church will show the tremendous efforts made to define the meaning of theological terms.