The Paschal season is the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, the central mystery of the Orthodox faith. According to the Apostle Paul the resurrection of all men necessarily follows from the resurrection of Christ and vice versa, and if the resurrection is not true then our faith is in vain (1 Cor 15:12-17). As the Person of Christ is the core content of the faith (Mtt 16:13-19) then the importance of the resurrection as described by St Paul must be integral to our understanding and experience of the Person of Christ, and therefore a false Christology will lead to a false or deficient view of the resurrection. Indeed, as Christ is the ultimate meaning and criterion of value for all existence, so the resurrection must have transformative significance for all things, all creatures and all human striving. The Orthodox Church, filled with this life of the resurrection, produces Saints and Fathers of the Church in every age. Its revealed theology is also living because it is, as inexhaustible and divine yet not opposed to reason, articulated in every age in language which seeks to be subtler and more appropriate to express divine realities in ways relevant to the spiritual development and problems of the time, but as it is ever and always the same revelation the faith is always to be kept in continuity with the past, unchanged in content.[1] This is the view of St Vincent of Lerins that “the intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.”[2]
Fr. Dumitru Staniloae (1903-1993) is widely recognized as one of the greatest Orthodox theologians of the 20th century. Fr. Staniloae is best known in the West for his six volume Dogmatic Theology titled in English The Experience of God in which the dogmas of the Church are explicated systematically in light of the personal relationship between God and man, the system being “the living unity of Christ, the person in whom there is united, and who himself unites, divinity and creation.”[3] A modern Church Father, a confessor who experienced the prayer of the heart and is soon to be canonized,[4] Fr. Staniloae as one of the greatest representatives of the resurrection of Orthodox theology in the modern era is a illuminating guide in studying the dogma of Christ’s Person in relation to the resurrection of all.
1. The Relation between Person and Nature in Christ
Why are all resurrected, and what is the significance of this reality? To understand this we must understand the relation between person, or hypostasis, and nature, according to revealed Orthodox theology. Throughout his Dogmatics Fr. Staniloae returns to this theme and gives many in-depth explanations and analogies, but for our purposes it should be sufficient to produce in part the explanation of the Person of Christ from the third volume of his dogmatics, in which Staniloae draws upon and interprets the thought of Leontius of Byzantium:
“Thus the person, who is the mode of concrete subsistence of human nature, is a unitary center of all his acts and relations… The person is a unique "who" that exists and knows himself as the subject of a nature or of a complex set of qualities… When seen as unity, this complexity is a person; when seen as a complex set of qualities, it is nature. But this complex set of qualities cannot be seen as standing by itself. It subsists in a unitary "who" or as a unitary "who.” If nature cannot really exist except in or as a "someone," in or as a person the supreme reality must also have a Personal character. Only in that Person can nature be contemplated. Thus, reality is Hypostatic, Personal, or it subsists in the Person.”[5]
In short, hypostasis is not reducible to nature. Nature exists or subsists only as enhypostatized in a subject, the “who” that is the one we predicate actions to, “he sleeps” or “he eats.” Furthermore, while all nature including inanimate and irrational nature exists in hypostasis, i.e. really subsisting not in abstract, not all nature is “personal,” as person is more appropriate to designate spiritual hypostases, conscious, moral and free agents who reveal their personal character through their actions or energies. It is on this definition, which Fr. Staniloae identifies as explicitly defended in the 5th Ecumenical Council as the only correct way to understand the Chalcedonian Dogma without falling into Nestorianism (believing the human nature of Christ has a human hypostasis proper to it) or Monophysitism (strict identity between hypostasis and nature, leading to merging), that we dogmatically say:
“… in Jesus Christ human nature received its concrete existence not as its own center, but in a preexistent center, in the unity of the Logos's divine Hypostasis… Jesus Christ's identity as the central man lies in the fact that the potentials of human nature are no longer activated by a human hypostasis, but by the divine Hypostasis, who embraces with His endless love all persons and all things.”[6]
In Christ there is no human hypostasis, instead the divine hypostasis God the Word is hypostasis to the human nature. The divine hypostasis is the subject of all Christ’s actions and is the personal subject manifest through them, actualizing human nature to its fullest potential. It is with this theological understanding that we can say that Christ’s humanity is anhypostasis, as it is without a human hypostasis, and also say Christ is a human person, because the divine Hypostasis is hypostasis to the human nature and fulfills human personhood. Orthodox Christology repudiates all false dialectics as it is based upon the actual experience of God, the experience of Christ “who” is none other than God the Word. Drawing on St Theodore the Studite’s arguments against the Iconoclasts Fr. Staniloae explains how Christ’s face is the very face of God:
“The hypostasis of the heavenly Son, because He is in the image of the Father as the filial expression of divine nature, also becomes the hypostasis of the human image, or of the human face, which is created with Him as its model… In assuming the human face, the Son's hypostasis gives it personal hypostatic characteristics, distinguishing it from the face of any other man but preserving the general features of human nature.”[7]
Hypostasis and nature are distinct. The hypostasis is the subject enhypostatizing nature within it as its content, and actualizing nature’s energies in its personal mode or tropos. Nature subsists in the hypostasis, and without nature the hypostasis would be unreal, without content, but conversely nature without hypostasis does not exist concretely and has no meaning as meaning is only found in persons. In Orthodox Christology the divine and human natures subsist and are personalized within God the Word, the personal subject of both natures, and because of this the human nature concretely existing in Him is Him, bearing unique characteristics as His own.
2. Christ the Second Adam
Understanding the distinction between person and nature as well as their relation as revealed by Christ allows us to understand how Christ can die as well as raise His humanity from the dead. This is the communicatio idiomatum. Christ as the Person of the divine and human natures looses or restrains the divinizing of His humanity appropriate to the different stages of His ministry, not only to take on and then annihilate death but also so that His humanity may develop through and so fulfill all stages of human life, such as the ignorance of youth and the blameless passions. However, we must ask how Christ’s resurrection as an individual extends to all humanity? Even after His resurrection Christ is an individual among men, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see (Lk 24:39),” thus how can we say Christ is the Second Adam and the new Man (1 Cor 15:45-49)?
The answer to this dilemma is to be found in the theology of the Person of Christ as none other than the divine Logos who is the many divine logoi. Being the Hypostatic image or Word of the Father the Logos enhypostatizes the divine energy as a structural whole manifesting the unity of the divine life through the interrelatedness of the divine reasons.[8] In creation the Logos “goes forth out of goodness into individual being” energetically as the many logoi,[9] the logoi being the divine exemplars which carry the immutable definitions of created essences,[10] and so the Logos in His logoi is the very being of beings and creatures are said to be a “portion of God” as the logoi constitute the structure and limits of their natures.[11] Fr. Staniloae further explains this mystery of creation:
“The Logos, or the Word of God, was in the world since its inception, on one hand through the reasons/inner principles of things, which are created images sustained by God's eternal reasons, and on the other hand through human persons who, in their living rationality, are the images of the Word of God's own Hypostasis. They were created in order to think the reasons of things through together and in dialogue with the divine Personal reason… Their ultimate substratum is the energy which has in itself a meaning or a complexity of meanings. This energy includes in itself the tendencies of certain indefinite interferences, which produce those units that are connected among them. Created things are the created images of the divine reasons given material form, images filled with power and carried by the tendency of innumerable references among themselves. In the state of these images given material form are reflected the meaning. the power, and the life of the divine reasons in their unity, which comes from the divine Logos.”[12]
In short, human nature is not merely an abstraction from material similarity,[13] it is the logos of humanity, the divine archetype consisting of all the divine reasons making up the limits and potentials of man’s essence to be actualized by man in his existence. And because this logos is the divine energy, and not something created, man exists by that existence which God has, is wise through connection with that wisdom which is God, and has for his virtues and grace the goodness of God. Man is therefore an image of the divine Image, the Logos, and is capable of manifesting the fullness of His personality in hypostatic union.
In the Incarnation the Logos assumes and individualizes human nature in Himself, but as the Divine Logos He is the fullness of all the logoi including the logos of humanity. While because of the fall mankind which had been created from nothing was moving towards non-being in progressive alienation from the divine reason, in Christ the divine archetype becomes united to its created image, uniting and fully actualizing human nature in Himself. Fr. Staniloae, drawing on the thought of Sts. Maximus the Confessor and Nicholas Cabasilas explicates the significance of this:
“All human hypostases have the Hypostasis of the Word as their ultimate Hypostasis. But Christ's human nature has God the Word as Hypostasis in such an intimate way that it no longer has its own hypostasis as human beings do. Only in this way can human beings also have God the Word in a more complete manner as their ultimate Hypostasis. At the same time, their hypostases are strengthened through the relationship with the most firm Hypostasis of human nature because this is the one that opens it up the most, together with their hypostases as windows opened toward God and toward each other.”[14]
Human nature can no longer as a whole move towards non-being as it is anchored in Christ Who as its Divine Hypostasis realizes this nature fully in Himself in His relation to the Father, thus filling it with the divine life of communion in the Holy Trinity. Since love is to be understood as the giving of oneself fully to the other, in Christ death becomes precisely the full gift of human nature to God, in contrast to the death of those under the Old Covenant described as a forgetfulness and sundering of nature. Death is transfigured into sacrifice which is the very essence of love, and so death is trampled down by death and life is given to all of humanity as Christ’s death is His resurrection. In short, the Logos in becoming an individual man remains the logos of humanity and what He works as individual thus transforms all human nature, for as the Divine Person Who is the logos of mankind His individual actions can fulfill human nature. As Fr. Staniloae explains, no created hypostasis could accomplish the resurrection of all:
“The Russian theologian Nesmelov attempted to explain the resurrection of sinners' bodies by the fact that the Lord, in resurrecting the human nature that He assumed, made the general human nature eternal, given that His resurrected nature did not constitute a separate human hypostasis. When He rose again, the resurrection became "a law" for all, just as when Adam died, death became a law for all. ‘If Christ was only an ideally holy man, the Son of God according to grace, not according to essence, His resurrection would have had an individual character as a ‘miracle,’ which-similar to Elijah being taken up to heaven would have been only a testimony to God's mercifulness exclusively toward Him, but in no way would it have influenced the destiny of all humankind.’”[15]
3. The Ultimate Value and Absolute Criterion
That all are resurrected gives absolute meaning to human existence which could not be found, or was awaited but not attained, during the period of the Old Covenant. All humans long for eternity and eternity as a fullness of meaning and love because this is what they were created for, “For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it (Wis. 2:23-24).” If all that awaits man is a death in which he becomes non-existent or is incapable of any actualization of his potentials in communion, then there is no worth to my existence. I will not be sufficient for grounding meaning and worth as I will never actualize my potential to the fullest and so will never be an absolute standard, nor can I find this within communion with other persons as they too will pass away. St. King Solomon gave inspired word to this existential plight of the created person, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun (Eccl. 1:2-3)?” The heat death of the universe or the endless cycles of paganism, man cannot find the meaning and worth of his person in any of these, and I would say the same is even true of those theologies in which the human receives immortality through justification and an act of divine will but without communion in the life of the Trinity, or is swallowed into a one-sided relation in which he sees the divine but can contribute nothing of his own. In all these conceptions the human person is either dissolved, rendered completely passive, or exists in an eternal monotony.
The resurrection of Christ, however, is not simply a resurrection to immortality and it renders no one passive, rather it is a resurrection to fullness of communion in the divine life between God and man as free persons. Christ as Person fulfills human nature while preserving human persons in their distinct existence, and thus Christ is a Person in communion with us in which He is our ultimate value and absolute criterion. As a subject Christ gives value to our subjective existence, for He is also the objective truth of all things, and so objective truth is inseparable from love between persons and is to be discovered within the circumstances and actions of our subjective existence. Furthermore, Christ does not give meaning and value to me in isolation, but to me in communion with all mankind. While the Church on earth is the locus of deification, it must be said that because of the resurrection all of humanity is being built up by the Spirit into the fullness of Christ. To use the words of St Paul the Church is “the fulness of him that filleth all in all (Eph 1:23).” This fullness of life and meaning validates all human effort and striving and radiates through eternity both forwards and backwards in time. The history of the pre-Incarnation world is seen as bearing the meaning of the Logos who was to come, especially in Israel but also in all histories. Hellenic philosophy is transfigured, Rome is converted, and the triumph of the Cross spreads throughout the world visibly manifesting the Heavenly Kingdom which was planted in the world with the death and resurrection of Christ.
While this positive view of history would be proclaimed by many Orthodox as regards certain past points in time such as the apostolic era, the Byzantine Empire, or even up to the fall of the Russian Empire, we notice that there is an apocalyptic feeling today. Many view history as at an end, and it is difficult to blame them with all the evils that occur today, not only wars and rumors of wars but the complete collapse of the sacred in society and the reduction of man to a mere quantity, while political ideologies pushed inorganically seem to demonstrate this as truth with how they effortlessly manipulate the masses. However, we Orthodox Christians know that man is not reducible to ones and zeroes, the resurrection of Christ has conquered this existence towards death. Our opposition towards this evil in the world must be positive, must be carried out both in opposition to evil and for the good’s own sake. We must make use of all our human energies in synergy with God to realize the image of God in all things. The arts, the sciences, politics, etc., are all to be used and engaged with as mankind progresses through history co-creating with God, as is his power as the image of God, the world that will enter into the eschaton.
Fr. Dumitru Staniloae theologizing from the reality of the resurrection argues that, while we cannot know the day nor hour when God will freely choose to bring an end to history, we must have faith that the end will come only in the fullness of time when God will have created all persons He wills to exist and when both good and evil will have reached their limit in the personalization of the world. He says:
“The end of the world will come when the world, or the body of Christ, is spiritually completed as a unitary and harmonious spirituality. The unity of that world has to comprise the totality of forms of individually incorporating Christ's divine-human spirituality. Surely, the fullness of union will be achieved on the other side. But over there are realized the things that are aspired to over here.”[16]
And he explains further:
“If we were to combine the reasons why history unfolds toward its end with the reason why God will stop it when He wills, we might say that the world will end when on one hand there are no longer any more humans who will complete the world from above, in order to express one of the features of Christ's spirituality, and on the other hand when those who appear will no longer take anything from the world and develop this within the world. The world will end when in it one can no longer develop the infinite spirituality that is concentrated in Christ. This exhaustion of history will be neither accidental nor forced by divine providence, but it will be due to history's mysterious convergence and encounter with the divine order, which does not exclude either human freedom or divine work. God's refusal to continue to reveal new depths through creation will coincide with creation's incapability to seize and develop these depths. The exhaustion of history's power to create and reveal spirituality will be a sign that the world above is completed.”[17]
While before the resurrection history was mankind’s march towards non-being and alienation from God, this is no longer the case. Mankind and the cosmos are irreversibly set in motion towards deification and history is now the era of the first resurrection, the Church age or millennium. We pray for Christ to come but also for Him to delay the final judgement because history is where His Body is being built up. The whole cosmos as far as is possible must be transfigured, our theology must seek new words, our societies must become more just, and most importantly we must become holy as God is holy, preparing and utilizing the material and immaterial creation in our persons for “the realization of the sons of God (Rom 8:19).” Evil does not dictate the end of all things, God does, and it is His will that all things be conformed to the image of His Son who is and will be all in all (Rom 8:29, 1 Cor 15:28).
Conclusion
As we said at the beginning of this article, the resurrection of Christ in the Church is what produces Saints in every age. Those in paradise are not limited to the number of the canonized Saints, rather, those who are canonized are a sample of those in paradise who the Church recognizes as its representatives of the resurrection in every era. They are the Church’s conscience, its standard of doctrine and spirituality, and are venerated as concrete persons in whom the Person of Christ is manifest, not as absorbing the human person but as reflected through His communion with them becoming known more deeply in their many faces. To use the words of Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, soon to be canonized and already recognized by many as integral to the conscience of our Church, “(Christ) guarantees the maximum value and eternity of human persons.”[18] All persons will be resurrected and to all the divine Person of Christ gives absolute value, but to receive the second resurrection unto life and not to condemnation we must enter into the communion of the first resurrection and live in newness of life (Rom 6:4) to “increase and make much and vigorous progress” in the building up of the Body of Christ.[19]
[1] Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God Vol. 1. (Brooklyn, NY: Holy Cross Orthodoxy Press, 1998), 84.
[2] Vincent, The Commonitory 23.54 (NPNF 2/11:148).
[4] “ROMANIAN CHURCH PREPARING TO CANONIZE ELDER CLEOPA, FR. DUMITRU STĂNILOAE, ELDER GHERASIM (ISCU)” Orthochristian.com, March 10, 2021. https://orthochristian.com/137894.html.
[5] Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God Vol. 3. (Brooklyn, NY: Holy Cross Orthodoxy Press, 1998), 27.
[7] Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God Vol. 6. (Brooklyn, NY: Holy Cross Orthodoxy Press, 1998), 106-107.
[8] Fr Dumitru Staniloae, “The Holy Spirit and the Sobornicity of the Church” in Theology and the Church. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 67-68.
[9] Maximus the Confessor, “Ambiguum 7” in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. Translated by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 57.
[10] Stoyan Tanev, Energy in Orthodox Theology and Physics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017), 133.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us! Thank you for this mist thought- provoking article. I never come away from a truly Orthodox text without the most remarkable feeling of awe in the Love of man that God has. This article in particular makes me think that and please correct me if I am wrong, but it makes me think that as Christ is the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages that even then were we made
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us! Thank you for this mist thought- provoking article. I never come away from a truly Orthodox text without the most remarkable feeling of awe in the Love of man that God has. This article in particular makes me think that and please correct me if I am wrong, but it makes me think that as Christ is the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages that even then were we made