Question from Brad Jersak:
If I hear the Early Church Fathers correctly:
The telos of Deity was to become human (a transfigured human by nature) without surrendering his deity.
The telos of humanity was to become divine (a transfigured human by grace) without surrendering our humanity.
Andrew Klager:
“God became man so that man might become gods,” as written by St. Athanasius in the context of the Arian controversy, but also found in several fathers – Sts. Basil of Caesarea and Irenaeus most prominent among them.
There’s a paradox though, and your observation, “without surrendering our humanity,” touches on it: when we consider the kenotic (self-emptying) maneuver of the Logos incarnate, it is precisely our humanity (if embraced properly and attentively) that reveals the extent to which we have “partaken of the divine nature” (2 Pt. 4:1). This is to say, when the pre-existent Logos took on the flesh of the Theotokos, he revealed the divine virtues that are intrinsic to him—humility and love—but that are contextualized in time and space within a postlapsarian world, i.e., translated as mercy in a postlapsarian world that now needs mercy, compassion in a postlapsarian world that now needs compassion, patience in a postlapsarian world that now requires patience, peace in a postlapsarian world that now needs peace, etc. This is co-suffering love, but a love that can only be expressed quintessentially when God and we embrace his and our humanity.
So, the incarnation is an expression of empathetic solidarity, but also a revelation of the divine virtues of humility, love, peace, compassion, mercy, patience—all intrinsically divine, but revealed only in Christ’s “lowly” incarnation, which we also ingest and that courses through our veins at the Eucharistic encounter. In this sense, to the extent to which we partake of the divine, this divinity decodes the usefulness of our humanity as the anthropological condition that provides the opportunity to grow in these same virtues of humility, compassion, mercy, etc. in a postlapsarian world. This is our salvation; this is how “now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2) and how the corporeal world, of which God and we participate, is our salvation.
An illustration: in a postlapsarian world, my passions might drive me to impatience if I am in a hurry to get to point “A” from point “B” (and even pride if it’s somewhere important), but our physical limitations are a gift, as they provide me with an opportunity to cooperate with divine grace to grow in the virtues of patience and humility. The physical world is therefore our salvation and is just as divine—touched by and with its source in God—as the spiritual and bodiless world. This is also why, as a monastic’s vow is her or his salvation, my commitment in marriage is my salvation, as I can’t (theoretically) run away from difficult circumstances that might breed the passions and vices in me, but instead must be *transfigured* by these circumstances in order to “make it work” and exhibit the union between Christ and the Church—with the Church needing to partake of the divine in order for her to be compatible with the divine for such union to take place; my marriage, too, then, is my salvation. This salvific function of the corporeal world of which we participate is why we fast (with the “rules” externally selected in the same way we don’t pick our sins that we must battle against), why we give alms, and why we pray—as the three so-called pillars of the Church (Mt. 6:1-18). This is the sacramentality of the world in which we all—Christian or not—are forced to participate / contend. Every minutiae of everyday life—if we are attentive / watchful (cf. nepsis)—every day, hour, minute, second, and nanosecond is a gift and invitation to salvation as the cultivation of the divine virtues of humility, compassion, love, patience, temperance, self-control, sobriety, mercy, and peace.
So, this super long explanation is why, yes, we are to become divine without surrendering our humanity, and even by embracing our humanity and its implications.
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