“… And was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary and became man,” this phrase from the Nicene Creed expresses our faith in the reality that the Son of God assumes humanity from the Virgin Mary and becomes man Himself. This is often articulated as assuming “human nature” from the Theotokos in an abstract sense, the Son through Mary individuating the common abstract humanity we each share in as individualizations of a universal. It is still possible, on this scheme, to talk about the cosmic and pan-human effects of the incarnation, but with awkwardness and difficulties because the formulation is inadequate and does not go far enough in plumbing the mystery’s depths. If previously we articulated an ontology of personhood in which persons are persons only in co-constituting relation to all other persons, then we will find the same is true regarding nature.
A difficulty we must first surmount is any separation or abstracting of person, or hypostasis, from nature or essence. These things are not, in fact, two realities, but are rather two mutually entailing aspects of a single reality that is God or the human being. In its many centuries long history of theological development, the concept of the person in Orthodox theology has come to designate that which is the substantiation of a nature as a unique reality self-determining and transcending, or actualizing itself, in relation. Person then is irreducible to nature, the common or the “what” which the “who” is by content and as its subject, but this irreducibility is not in any way separability or an independent reality. Person as substantializing of nature only is as person or hypostasis proper to its nature, for example, a human hypostasis “is” only as that which substantiates and actualizes its reality as human, a human body and spirit with all their natural potentials and transcendent ends. In the same way then, nature, construed as a substantial reality or principle irreducible to hypostasis, is also only what it is as actualized in and adequately manifesting its proper hypostasis, or to quote David Bentley Hart, “any ‘personal’ hypostatic realization of a nature is the realization of a nature that is intrinsically personally hypostatic—which is to say, capable of actuality only in and as ‘personhood.’”[1]
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s favored ontological scheme to illustrate the above was the linguistic structure of subject-predicate united by copula, “I-am-Thou,” which illustrates the ontology of person as constituted in relation to other persons and person in relation to his own nature.[2] Regarding the ontology of person in relation, a person is only a fully actualized subject in mutual definition by and in the predicate of the other, I am only I in and through Thou, and their connection (the copula “am”) completes this structure of interpersonal revelation constituting their existence. The same is true for the relation of hypostasis to itself as nature and vice versa, I “am” my nature and my nature “is” me, this “am/is” being that completion of communion or actualization of this reality as a single whole which is the human being. Understanding this, persons exist in relation not as disincarnate subjects but as a common nature, the multi-hypostatic communion of humanity being the common actualization together of the one humanity, consubstantiality as Adam. Furthermore, and here we touch the actual significance of what it means for God to become man, human consubstantiality just is the reality that all concretely existing human beings in their plurality are absolutely mutually entailing members of a whole that is a single body, not abstractly but in living actuality.
What does it mean then that God “became man?” It means that God became the whole of humanity, that is, every individual human being, assuming them all and entirely as person and nature. This does not mean that human personality and individuality is obliterated or reduced to a myriad of masks. To think so is to forget that identity can be explicated in many different ways while not reducing the force of the truth of that identity. Again, in my own existence “I” am not reducible to my nature but I “am” my nature, the “am” being the actualization of me as “me” in a point of indistinction, indistinction not as a void but as actuality or life, where nature and person are completely one and yet not reduced or annihilated. The same is true for inter-personal existence. The “I” or hypostasis is simultaneously my absolute unique subjectivity, my hidden depth, and yet the I “is” only in relation to all other “I”s such that I “am” all and all are “I,” but in this revelation my “I” as unique reality or hiddenness is not obliterated because this revelation is precisely of absolute unique “I”s.
Thus, in assuming humanity from she who is the true Eve by being the true and proto-person containing all humanity, Mary, the Son of God becomes every human precisely while and in becoming an individual human. He who is the Logos of all logoi, or “I” of all created “I’s,” also becomes a man among all men because this is what is entailed by becoming all mankind. Indeed, this is the completion of the act of creation. If what we have said above about persons relation to nature and to other persons is true, namely, that uniqueness and otherness are only one side of an antinomy which also includes communion as a point of indistinction, then it must be understood that human nature and person are other than God, as strictly speaking God shares no property of finitude and contingency which creatures are, and simultaneously that the natural end of the creature (whether construed as return of logoi to Logos, or of knowing as we are known, or any other of an infinity of expressions) is to be found in its beginning in a point of indistinction between God and creation, the love of God. Logically, there is no escaping this conclusion unless one wishes to opt for a metaphysical dualism or a denial of created personhood, but it is strange to imagine why one would want to escape this logic.
The natural end for human nature, that is, the telos of human nature which achieved and actualized is to be fully human, is deification. St. Maximus the Confessor, for example in Ambiguum 7, does not explicate a neat two-tiered system in which the logoi are extrinsic signposts calling along a creature, who by nature is unlike God and of some other substance, to strive after them by some anti-natural ecstasy to attain a better end than the alternative of hell. Rather, for St. Maximus the logoi are the end of the creature as being the creature’s beginning, and inhere in the creature, are the positive “being” of the creature and its natural virtues which are the powers in the creature to attain its end, are indeed Christ in the creature, and the recapitulation of creation in man is nothing other than the embodying of the Logos in all things. In short, deification in God is the creation’s natural end because the creation, in its positive ontology or in its being insofar as it is being and not nothing (finitude and potency), is nothing other than God as the being of beings. Creation is the bringing into being and granting substantial existence to the finite instantiation or emanation of God’s nature, to the Adam Kadmon, or to use Palamite terminology, God grants substantial and hypostatic reality to the rays of His own glory,[3] and it is this becoming god that has its natural end in and as God. Created being is a participation in divine being precisely as finite instantiation of the divine, and in no other way.
This understanding of created nature is necessary to affirm a central truth of Christianity, namely, that human nature is not alien to the Logos but rather has Him as its proper hypostasis. Human nature is fully actualized and reaches its natural telos precisely in manifesting the hypostasis of Christ, and this can only be the case if the content of human nature is, in a finite modality, the content of God’s own nature or glory. A completely alien nature, constituting or deriving from some other ontological arche and principle, could not express the divine hypostasis, could not have it as its substance, and so could not receive the Incarnation let alone be created at all! It would constitute an absolutely opposed other, a dualistic enemy circumscribing God by its ontological opposition. To affirm the Incarnation is thus to affirm that all that exists is God and created becoming-God, or Logos and logoi, or divine being and its procession, etc., and that in the person of the Logos this difference is simultaneously substantiated, as granting substantial self-determining reality to the procession, and overcome, in effecting the return or union of the procession to its source which is its end.
The above said, this necessary metaphysical monism must not be taken as undermining the substantial, self-determining, existence of humanity and creation. The Logos creates and really assumes a natural “otherness,” a personal reality and partner to God, not a puppet or illusion. Creation, and mankind as encompassing creation as its head, is not something assumed by Christ in abstract but in the fullness of its living actuality. Put another way, Christ assumes all humanity, including human will, and not only in his individual life is this will freely actualized to deification in submission to the Father, but this is true for human will as a whole, the individual willing of Christ being a result and manifestation of this assumption of humanity’s will. What this means is that the Incarnation both effects the deification of created nature, and is also predicated upon this nature being completely open to, as directed towards and ultimately united with, the God who assumes it. But again, what is human nature except all humanity as really existing? Thus, that the Son became Incarnate manifests the truth that all of humanity in and as Him is deified, because the alternative in which any portion of humanity is not deified would imply that all of human nature was not assumed because not having its ultimate end in God. As stated previously, the logoi proceed from God only because they will be and in eternity already are returned to Him, and this just is the logic of the Incarnation by which the Son becomes man because He will and eschatologically has united all of creation to Himself as His Body.
We thus come to the revelation of this mystery in the Theotokos herself. Her “let it be,” as an act of will, is both hypostatic and natural, any act of will being a hypostatic or self-determined movement of nature towards a given natural end. If previously in focusing on the hypostatic side of the equation we concluded that her “let it be” is and manifests the eschatological “yes” of all hypostases to their creation and end in God, then we must now say that this “yes” insofar as nature is concerned is the full actualization of nature in revealing her hypostatic character as this “yes” to God, and in so doing reveals that all human nature is ultimately fully open to and conformed to God to manifest the Hypostatic communion of God with all the sons of God. To state it more clearly, what the Virgin offers the Son is all humanity as fully open and God-oriented nature actualized towards its proper end, that being the Incarnation. She is able to offer humanity in this way because, despite sacrificially living under the effects of the fall, she exists according to the order or mode of life of the eschaton as the Mother of God and of all living. Hypostatically and naturally, as these things are inseparable, she is that ultimate “yes” to God, and this “yes” is not confined by fallen individuality, but is rather the yes of personality fully realized as the whole Adam and nature as consubstantiality. That is, this “yes” is the “yes” of love in which no person is person without all persons, and it is the full realization of human nature as the consubstantial manifestation of this multi-hypostatic love as the one body of Christ.
Conclusion
The Christmas season confronts us with the reality that there is no one created who is not a person existing in relation to the Mother of God as their Mother, no one she could do without, and therefore ultimately all generations will call her blessed (Lk 1:48). This is the reality of the divine economy which theological reflection upon the Mother of God manifests. It is a shocking thing to think upon, but of course it is, for nothing could be more shocking than the Theotokos’ deafening proclamation of “let it be” which, split up into different temporal events (Incarnation, Recapitulation, Crucifixion, Ascension and Deification), is that one eternal divine-human act of Sophia building Her house. This house is the Body of Christ containing many mansions, as many as there are created creatures, and all contained in the Virgin who is truly more spacious than the Heavens.
As I said in the beginning, this theological speculation (which, I confess, is not original but is based on many authors, some of whom I cite) is compelled by the mystery of the Theotokos and the Virgin Birth. A mystery is not something irrational compelling fideistic acceptance, it is a revelation precisely in its hiddenness that draws us “further up, and further in,” and is supposed to transform us in our necessary attempts both to live and think it. In this active response, we imitate the Theotokos whose soul rejoiced and magnified God by recognizing and declaring the salvation wrought through her, not in refusing to acknowledge its depths or furtively keeping its significance secret. So, to any who object to the conclusions reached in this article on the presumption that theological thought must not ask these questions, must not think the mystery in this way, because some authority supposedly decided so, well, there is not much else to do but throw up ones hands and say “he that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still (Rev 22:11), or to quote one famous Marian hymn.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be
[1] David Bentley Hart, “Masks, Chimaeras, and Portmanteaux: Sergii Bulgakov and the Metaphysics of the Person” Leaves in the Wind, October 31, 2022. https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/masks-chimaeras-and-portmanteaux. A shortened version of the article was presented at a conference held at the University of Fribourg titled “Building the House of Wisdom” on the 150th anniversary of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s repose. It can be accessed from this video on the institute’s official Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/pM110dn_d-o?t=29093
[2] See for example Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter. Boris Jakim, trans., (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 63-65, 360. See also the above cited article by Dr. Hart.
[3] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Boris Jakim, trans., (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 92.
“ In the end times a man will be saved by love, humbleness and kindness. Kindness will open the gates of Heaven, humbleness will lead him into Heaven; a man, whose heart is filled with love will see God.” St. Gabriel of Georgia. Thank you for this article both Part One and Two praying that the Lord will continue to give you wisdom. Blessed Theotokas we magnify thee!
“ In the end times a man will be saved by love, humbleness and kindness. Kindness will open the gates of Heaven, humbleness will lead him into Heaven; a man, whose heart is filled with love will see God.” St. Gabriel of Georgia. Thank you for this article both Part One and Two praying that the Lord will continue to give you wisdom. Blessed Theotokas we magnify thee!