Incarnation

“Others do not attach any importance to the descent of the Son of God and the dispensation of His incarnation, which the apostles announced and the prophets predicted that through this the perfection of our humanity should be realized. And such should be counted among those of little faith.” We read these words in the recently discovered Armenian work of St. Irenaeus of Lyons “Proof of the Apostolic Preaching” (chapter 99). These words of the great church theologian of the 2nd century, heard again in our 20th century, do not they contain some reproach and denunciation for modern religious consciousness? After all, how many people should now be counted among those of little faith because they too belittle the significance of the “dispensation of the incarnation” and are even ready not to attach any significance to this incarnation? Indeed, what is especially characteristic of modern religious consciousness is that it wants to be Christian without Christ, the Son of God. It needs Christian teaching, but it knows little about the incarnate Son of God. The entire essence of Christ’s work is exhausted by His teaching, and He Himself is only a “great teacher” along with Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Tolstoy. “I,” writes Tolstoy in the preface to the Geneva edition of “A Brief Exposition of the Gospel,” “look at Christianity as a teaching that gives meaning to life... and therefore for me it makes absolutely no difference whether Jesus Christ was God or not.” Despite Tolstoy’s disdain for the person of Christ the Savior, many are, however, ready to consider him a “true Christian.” This means that the Divine personality of the Savior is not dear to such people and the blasphemous relegation of their Savior to the category of ordinary people, even great ones, does not resonate with pain in their hearts? Modern consciousness, thoroughly saturated with intellectualism, is destructive for living faith in the incarnate Son of God; it precisely forces one to replace Christ, the Son of God, with the man Jesus of Nazareth. We also call Protestantism a Christian confession, but this confession, which is most suitable to the worldview of a modern European, has almost completely lost faith in the Divinity of the Savior, in the incarnation of the Son of God on earth. More than half of German pastors consider it possible to remain in their title, denying the Divine dignity of Christ, not believing in the incarnation of the Son of God on earth. Perhaps it is no less sad that our school dogmatics place little value on the incarnation of the Son of God in their educational manuals. Our dogmatics is able to present the matter of our salvation in such a way that it turns out to have no connection with the incarnation. “Humanity, in the fall of its ancestors, immeasurably offended the justice of God and could not satisfy this justice until Christ, the Son of God, having suffered on the Cross for the sins of the whole world, satisfied the truth of God, reconciled people with God and delivered them from sin, curse and death.” Until now, the doctrine of salvation in dogmatic textbooks is presented approximately in this form. Not to mention the fact that such a teaching was entirely created by the legal understanding of life of Catholic scholasticism, which is alien to the Church, we cannot help but notice that the very fact of the incarnation of the Son of God is, as it were, kept silent and the meaning of this fact is not spoken about. For the legal representation of our salvation, only the Cross and suffering are needed, not the Incarnation; he only needs the terrible Golgotha ​​with the darkened sun, the trembling earth, the torn curtain, and not peaceful Bethlehem with the Heavenly choirs of Angels singing: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!” (Luke 2:14). This is not how the Church and its greatest theologians, called the “Fathers of the Church,” teach about salvation. When speaking about salvation, they first of all remember the incarnation. Already from the quoted words of St. Irenaeus can see the significance of the economy of the incarnation. It is through this incarnation that the perfection of our humanity must be realized. For this perfection, teaching alone is not enough, even Christian. Humanity must not only be taught, but also given the strength for moral perfection, which it, weakened by sin, does not have. “Our unchanging Columbus of all the open Americas” (as V.S. Solovyov called Tolstoy) thought that by repeating the long-known sermon about love, one could recreate the world, and yet he did not recreate the lives of even those closest to him. A person recognizes with his mind that the law of Divine love is high and good, but he will not find in his sinful nature the strength to implement this law; on the contrary, he will constantly see in himself a different law, warring against the law of his mind, and he will only have to exclaim together with the great apostle: “I am an unfortunate man!” (Rom. 7:24). The idea of ​​saving humanity by teaching alone is absolutely insane. How many times have we repeated various teachings to the world, but it’s all to no avail. And when they begin to look at Christ only as a teacher, they deprive all of Christianity of all vitality and vital meaning. Both the word of God and the patristic writings insist that Christ is the incarnate Son of God, Consubstantial with God the Father. Without the incarnation of the Son of God, a new life for humanity is impossible. “In this was revealed the love of God for the world, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, so that we might receive life through Him” (1 John 4:9). “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” This is why “he who has the Son (of God) has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:11–12). Christians are a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), and the work of Christ is the creation of precisely this new creation. What created this new creature from the “old man”? It was created by the incarnation on earth of the Only Begotten Son of God and His incarnation, as we confess in the Creed, and not only by the teachings of Jesus Christ. Ancient church writers even claim that the teaching of Christ did not contain anything essentially new, compared with the Old Testament. What is new in the New Testament is precisely the very incarnation of the Son of God. “Read,” writes St. Irenaeus of Lyons, - more carefully the Gospel given to us by the apostles, and read more carefully the prophets, and you will find that all the activities, all the teaching and all the suffering of our Lord were predicted by them. If such a thought arises in your mind, and you say: “What new did the Lord bring with His coming? Know that He brought everything new by the fact that He, proclaimed, brought Himself. For this very thing was predicted, that something new would come, that would renew and revive man... He brought Himself and bestowed upon people the previously announced blessings into which the Angels wished to enter” (Against heresies. IV, 34, 1). “The Son of the Most High became the Son of Man in order that man might become the son of God” (III, 10, 2). “The Word of God Jesus Christ, our Lord, by His immeasurable goodness became what we are, in order to make us what He is” (V. Preface). “Jesus Christ the Son of God, out of excellent love for His creation, condescended to be born of a Virgin, through Himself uniting man with God” (III, 4, 2). “The Word of God became Man, likening Himself to man and man to Himself, so that through likeness to the Son man would become precious to the Father” (V, 16, 2). “What happened in the Lord will also happen in us, since the Body follows its Head” (IV, 34, 4). The creation becomes conformable and co-corporeal with the Son of God. The creation receives the Word and ascends to Him, surpassing the Angels and becoming in the image and likeness of God (V, 36, 3). In these words St. Irenaeus his teaching on salvation. Salvation is precisely the re-creation of human nature itself through the incarnation of the Son of God, thanks to which human nature received new strength, becoming involved in the Divine life. Along with this, St. Irenaeus expresses the unshakable conviction that salvation could not have been accomplished in any other way than the incarnation of the Son of God. “We could not possibly receive incorruptibility and immortality if we were not united with incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be united with incorruptibility and immortality, if incorruptibility and immortality had not first become what we are, so that the corruptible would be swallowed up by incorruptibility and the mortal by immortality, so that we might receive adoption as sons?” (III, 19, 1). If God had not granted salvation, then we would not have it firmly, and if man had not united with God, he could not have become a participant in incorruption (III, 18, 7). Those who deny the incarnation and assert that Christ was only a simple man born of Joseph remove man from ascending to God (III, 19, 1). Consequently, any improvement of man is based on the incarnation of God on earth. This is how the Church believed and professed, this is how its outstanding theologians taught it. And it is clear what danger the holy fathers of the Church saw for the religious and moral life of mankind when Arianism came out with the doctrine that the Son of God is not God, Consubstantial with God the Father, but is only a creature. The greatest theologians of the golden 4th century rebelled against the teachings of Ariev, they rebelled precisely in defense of the incarnation of the Son of God, which was necessary for the religious ideal of the Church, for all church people have always lived and live in hope for the renewal of the fallen Adam in them, for the deification of human nature. This religious ideal of the Church and the high church aspirations were radically undermined by the Arian false teaching, which did not consider the Son to be consubstantial with the Father, and therefore did not recognize the incarnation of God on earth. For the Fathers of the Church, the Arians, first of all, were people who renounced the great and unchangeable religious ideal of the Church, which, for its implementation, certainly requires the incarnation of God on earth to recreate human nature. The religious ideal of the Arians and other heretics who denied the Divinity of Christ always seemed to the holy fathers of the Church poor and pitiful in comparison with the ideal of the Church. “He is truly poor in understanding, in hope, and in deed – he who recognized Christ as a simple man and with such poverty of faith acquired hope in Him,” says St. Epiphanius of Cyprus about the Ebionites (Panarius. 31, 17). “Whoever confesses our Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God is a partaker of bliss, but whoever denies the Son of God is poor and pitiful,” writes St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Sermon. 11, 3). “Just as creatures were not created by creation, so a creature can never be saved by a creature” (Panarius. 31, 17). “If the Son were a creature, then man would still remain mortal, not being united with God, because the creature would not unite creatures with God, itself demanding for itself the uniter; and one part of the creation could not serve as salvation for the whole creation, itself having a need for salvation” (Athanasius the Great. Against the Arians. Second Word. 69). “What significance can a creature have for our salvation? What will a creature do for a creature? What good do creatures benefit from creatures?” (Epiphanius Panarius. 69, 36). When Modest tried to persuade Basil the Great to Arianism, he, according to Gregory the Theologian, replied: “I cannot bow to a creature, having the command to become a god” (Gregory the Theologian. Creations. Vol. 4, pp. 83–84)1. These words of Basil the Great could be repeated by the entire Church of Christ; she rejected Arianism precisely because she did not want to belittle her high religious ideal - the deification of humanity through the incarnation of the Son of God. It was this ideal that inspired St. in his heroic struggle against Arianism. Athanasius the Great, for whom he suffered in exile, endured slander and was called the Great by the Church. The Church, which treasured its ideal, did not yield to the heretics even one iota, by which in the Greek language the Consubstantial (omousios) differs from the sub-essential (omiusios). The presence of this iota made him a heretic and deprived him of hope for salvation, for it replaced the incarnation of the Son of God with the birth of a creature, even the highest of all. For the Church, not only was it completely indifferent whether Christ was God or not, but she considered the non-recognition of His complete and perfect consubstantiality in Divinity with God the Father to be an overthrow of “the whole power of the Gospel” (Basily the Great). Arians are not Christians. “Those who call Arians Christians are in a great and extreme error, as they have not read the Scriptures and do not know Christianity and the Christian faith at all. Truly, this means the same thing as calling Caiaphas a Christian, classifying Judas the traitor among the apostles, asserting that those who asked Barabbas instead of the Savior did nothing wrong, proving that Hymenaeus and Alexander are well-meaning people and the apostle is lying about them. But a Christian cannot listen to this patiently; and whoever dares to say this, no one will assume that he is of sound mind” (Athanasius the Great. Against the Arians. First Word. 1-2). Arianism was rejected with such decisiveness precisely because the ancient Church saw the essence of the work of Christ, the essence of salvation itself, not in teaching, but in the renewal of human nature through its participation in the Divine nature in the incarnation of the Only Begotten Son of God. This is precisely the teaching about the essence of our salvation that we see in all the most famous fathers of the Church, who waged a dogmatic struggle against Arianism. They reveal in detail those thoughts that we saw already in the 2nd century in St. Irenaeus of Lyons. All of them, speaking about salvation, first of all point to the incarnation as the means and basis of salvation. “The Lord took upon Himself what is ours and, sacrificing it, destroyed it and clothed us with His own” (St. Athanasius. To Epictetus. 6). “Just as the Lord, having clothed himself with flesh, became man, so we, people, perceived by the Word, are adored for the sake of His flesh” (His. Against the Arians. Third Word. 34). “The Word put on a created body, so that in it we could be renewed and deified” (His. Against the Arians. Second Word. 7). “It became man in order to deify us in Himself” (To Adelphius. 4). “We are all quickened in Christ, because our flesh is, as it were, no longer earthly, but with the Word brought into identity by the Word of God Himself, which for our sake “became flesh”” (Against the Arians. Third Word. 33). St. Gregory the Theologian says: “The inferior man became god after he united with God and became one with Him, because the best prevailed, so that I too could be god, since He became man” (Homily 29:19). For St. Gregory of Nyssa “Christianity is an imitation of the Divine nature” and “the elevation of man to ancient well-being” (To Armonius. Creations. Part 7. P. 217). “Our nature returns again to its previous state” (Antirritik. 55). And this is accomplished precisely by the incarnation. “The Word, existing in the beginning and with God, and the Word, the very existing God, Who in the last days, through communion with the humiliation of our nature, became flesh out of love for mankind and, united through it with man, took into Himself all of our nature, so that through dissolution with the Divine (nature) the human would be deified and by the firstfruits thereof the entire composition of our nature would be sanctified.” (Antirritik. 15). According to the teachings of St. Cyril of Alexandria, “God the Father was pleased to renew everything in Christ and recreate what was created in its primitive state, and sent the Only Begotten to us from Heaven” (Creations. Part 1, p. 119). The Only Begotten Son of God humbled Himself in order to transform human nature in Himself, the first, and through Himself again raise it to that original beauty (Commentary on the Gospel of John. Creations. Part 15, pp. 97–98). Finally, St. Basil the Great points out another meaning of the incarnation of the Son of God. He writes about the monks: “They clearly showed human life how many benefits the Savior’s incarnation brought us, because human nature, torn apart and cut into thousands of parts, is brought back into unity, to the best of its ability, both with itself and with God. For this is the main thing in the Savior’s economy in the flesh - to bring human nature into unity with itself and with the Savior and, having destroyed the evil section, restore the primitive unity: just as the best doctor, with healing medicines, reunites a body that has been dismembered into many parts” (Ascetic Rules. 18). According to St. Vasily, the main fruit of the incarnation is the restoration of the primitive unity of human nature. If this unity is restored, then it means that some external union of people previously separated by sin should be formed. Christ also spoke about this unity of people, pointing out its ideal in the essential unity of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity: “That they may be one, just as we are” (Jn. 17, 11). Christ said these words in the prayer that He offered to the Heavenly Father before His suffering, not only for the disciples and apostles, but also for all those who believe in Him through their word. Therefore, Christ prayed for the Church. The Church is precisely the unity of humanity for which Christ prayed and about which St. Basil the Great as a single nature. That is why we can say that “the main thing in the Savior’s economy in the flesh,” which St. speaks of. Vasily, is nothing other than the creation of the Church. The same thought should be seen in the words of Christ spoken in response to Peter’s confession. Simon Peter said: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Then Jesus answered him: ...I tell you: you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church” (Matthew 16:16-18). What was the Church founded on? On Peter, as Catholics claim? But that doesn't make any sense. At Peter's confession? But demons also believe (James 2:19), and they confessed Christ, like the Apostle Peter (Matthew 8:29; Mark 1:24; Luke 8:28), and, of course, they are not in the Church. The foundation of the Church can be recognized as the very incarnation of the Only Begotten Son of God, which was confessed by the Apostle Peter by the revelation of God, and not by the revelation of flesh and blood. It is this incarnation of the Son of God that lies at the foundation of the Church. It is sufficient, we think, to show how church antiquity taught about the incarnation of the Son of God. In this very incarnation she saw the essence of the work of Christ and the essence of our salvation. Modern religious consciousness does not, as has been said, attach any importance to the incarnation; but this is said about non-church religious consciousness. Even if school theology belittles the importance of the Divine Incarnation, the Church still teaches about the Incarnation in the same way as the glorious ancient theologians. Through its worship, the Church is connected with centuries of flourishing Christian theology. All the services of our Church are filled with the same ideas about the incarnation of the Son of God that we saw among the great holy fathers. To this day, the Church invariably sings about the transformation of human nature, about its deification through participation in the Divine nature in the incarnation of the Son of God. One cannot help but be convinced of this if one reads the dogmatic passages from one service of the Nativity of Christ, where truly “the wealth of Orthodox theology” (Na khlavitekh - Glory). These are the places: Today God has come to earth, and man has ascended to Heaven (at the 2nd stichera litia). Let all creation rejoice and play, for Christ has come to renew us and save our souls (on the poem - Glory). Decayed by crime, in the image of God that was, all the corruption that exists, the best of the Divine life, having fallen away, is again renewed by the Wise Creator (canon of Cosmas 1, canto 1, trop. 1). Having seen the Creator of the destruction of man, having created with his hands, he bowed the Heavens and descended; from this, from the Divine Virgin, the Pure One of all things exists, truly incarnate (canon of Cosmas, canto 1, trop. 2). He renewed us in manhood (canon of Cosmas, canto 1, trop. 3). Corresponding to the mortal degradation by dissolution, Christ, having become, and the communion of the bitter flesh, having given the Divine nature (canon of Cosmas, canto 3, trop. 2). Renewal of the human race... people, renewal (irmos 4 songs of the canon of John2). For all of us, having become impoverished and ringed by the very unity and communion, you have made God (canon of Cosmas, canto 5, trop. 1). Who from the first came to God, God the Word, now affirms the weak ancient being for us, who in His second communication showed free passions (canon of John, canto 6, trop. 1). Wear the wealth of deification (canon of John, canto 7, trop. 2). Having received the desire of God for the coming of Christ, people have been honored, now they are comforted again by existence (canon of John, canto 9, trop. 2). The glorious sacrament is being established today, nature is being renewed, and God is man (December 26 on the stichera of John the monk). Already these wondrous hymns, full of deep dogmatic meaning, show that, in perfect agreement with ancient church theological thought, the Orthodox Church sees the essence of our salvation in the deification and renewal of our sinful nature by the incarnation of the Son of God. Salvation is accomplished by incarnation, and not by teaching, as the thoroughly rationalistic religious consciousness of our time tends to think. The Church leads precisely to salvation, setting the goal of deification. Denial of this goal, closely related to the denial of the incarnation, deprives salvation. The holiday of the Nativity of Christ is not a commemoration of the birth on earth of a great teacher in the idyllic setting of a nativity scene. No, this is the greatest celebration of the accomplishment of a great pious (religious) mystery: “God appeared in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16). You might be interested in: