Глава третья. Боговоплощение

God created the world with a single act (which is the six-day one), investing in it the power of being forever. The creative word of God resounds for all times. “You have set the earth on firm foundations: it will not be shaken forever and ever” (Ps. 103:5). The world is the reality of God, for God’s power contains it. And the world is real not only for itself, but also for God himself. God does not repent of His deeds, “for he is not a man that he should repent” (1 Samuel 15:20). But the reality of the world also includes the real fullness of time in which formation occurs. The Word of God depicts to us God living in time together with the world and man, acting in the history of the world. The self-position of God in time, His departure from eternity into time, is the incomprehensible mystery of the life of God, which we can only reverently accept by faith, as a given of our religious consciousness: our religious thought, nourished by revelation, comes to it and rests on it. She equally does not dare to encroach on doubt either in the eternity of God or in the reality of time, turning it into a subjective illusion. To recognize God as living together with the world in time only means to recognize Him as the Creator and God of the real in eternity and for eternity of the world created, although becoming in time. Although the spiral of time will come to a point at the end, this will not lose reality and the entire elapsed time will not become an illusion. The life of God in eternity, in its fullness and immutability, in its timelessness and supertemporality, is transcendental, transcendental to world existence and time. But it is precisely from the depths of this absolute life that the Absolute posits Itself as God and turns its face to the world created by God, remaining in its absoluteness - man wants to say in his own language: at the same time. However, there is no simultaneity here at all, as a relationship in time, in its movement: one moves, the other at the same time remains motionless. The Absolute in His life is not at all thought of in time; it is not “simultaneous” with it, but deeper than it and above it. But it becomes correlative to time, since the latter arises, because if eternity in itself does not need time, then time, for its reality, necessarily postulates it. “Serious” and not empty time thirsts for eternity, and this thirst is already possession. For God, nothing new occurs in relation to His eternity in time (and thus the main bewilderment that arises regarding the assumption of time for God disappears). God also lives in time with His own eternity, having it only in a different way. But God, as the Creator, no longer lives only in Himself, but also outside of Himself, i.e. e, correlates with the extra-divine world, for which temporary becoming is the reality of its existence. This temporality becomes real for God as He lives with the world. But if for the world each atom of time brings something new, something that has not previously existed in its formation, for God this current time of something new, which did not exist in God, does not bring anything and cannot bring anything, for God is “rich” in eternity, and time is completely transparent for it. For God, in relation to the world, time contains novelty only in its novelty for the world, since God lives with the world. God is not alone in His absoluteness, but exists together with the world, in mutual existence and in interaction. Can God's relationship to the world be understood only as mutual existence without interaction, so that the world and God remain mutually neutral? According to the teachings of deism, the world is like a mechanism, once wound up forever by a skilled mechanic and then no longer in need of repair, so that God’s relationship to the world is completely exhausted by the act of creating the world. There is nothing more inconsistent with Revelation, as well as with rational consciousness, as this idea. First of all, this comparison itself is incorrect: the creation of the world is not a single act that has exhausted itself in a moment of time, but an act that continues throughout eternity. This is God’s ongoing creative relationship with the world, a relationship. Understanding God-Love only as a skilled mechanic who forgets about His creation also contains a moral non-sens. God created the world not in order to throw it away, like a child throwing away a boring toy, but in order to love it as His own, to have friends for Himself in its sons (John 15:16), to live with them, for will God forget His creation? Therefore, deism is atheism, moreover, of the worst, blasphemous type, for it, without denying the existence of the Supreme Being, actually blasphemes Him. However, there is also one correct motive in deism, or rather, a question: how can one understand the uniqueness of the world along with God, how can one preserve it in the face of His absoluteness? In the relationship of God with the world; indeed, there is an inequality that calls into question the very possibility of this relationship. Can it really be understood as interaction? And what is this opportunity? If it is not the relation of a mechanic to a mechanism, then is it not the relation of an absolute despot to a trembling creature, that is, arbitrariness, which in relation to a creature is predestination? And can this relationship be expressed differently? Are not all other attempts to soften this radicalism of Calvinism or Islam just half-hearted compromises that deviate from consistency? Is it possible to understand the relationship between God and the world, really, as interaction or, according to the Orthodox definition, “synergy”? Catholic scholasticism tries to evade the iron logic of Calvinism (and Jansenism) with the help of artificial constructions (of course, the first place among them is Molinism) in order to find a place of synergy and save the world from the all-consuming power of the absolute. But for this, she does not know the objective grounds within the world itself, which would ensure its originality even in relation to the Creator himself. The world in its being is the creation of God, it was created creatively and let it be. But in its content it is not an arbitrary invention, a whim of the absolute, for which the world is taken in systems of religious determinism or predestination, but it has a divine basis and divine content, it contains a certain divine reality. This reality is the Divine Sophia, the image of which is the foundation of the world, as created Sophia. In other words, the world contains something divine and for God, as His self-revelation. And therefore, it is not accidental, not arbitrary in its existence, but in itself it has a “sufficient basis” for its existence, indestructible in its divinity and for the Creator himself. The interaction of God with the world is based on the relationship between the Divine Sophia and the created. The world is created, but not only created, for in its prototype, in its idea, it is not created at all, but exists eternally in God, as His Divine world in the Wisdom of God, as the word of His Word and as the breath of His Spirit. However, if we thus elevate the world in its ontological basis, then does not the conclusion of deism about the absence of interaction between God and the world flow from here with even greater indisputability, since the world is not only a perfect mechanism, but no more than a mechanism, the Divine Wisdom itself in created form? Isn't such a world self-sufficient? Does he allow himself to be influenced, does he need it? This confusion is easily eliminated if we focus on the actual image of the world. Yes, the world is created Sophia, which has as its basis the image of Divine Sophia, but it, as a created world, is still only becoming. Consequently, in his being he both is and is not created Sophia. In it there is non-existence, “nothing” from which the world was created, although it has accepted the seeds of the Divine Sophia, but has not yet grown them. In the uniqueness of the world, a process takes place in which “nothing”, which has raised its head after its fertilization by the creative force and received existence for itself, does not immediately and easily contain its content and even opposes it. Although the world was created in all its completeness and perfection “good”, it is not complete in its state. He is called upon to contain and grow within himself the seeds of being, to become in the image of the Divine Sophia. It came from the hands of the Creator not only as a completed given, but also as an unfinished task that must be fulfilled in the world process. The world had to go through this path of its fulfillment under the leadership of man - in man and with man. But man himself wavered in his calling and fell, and thus the world process became endlessly complicated and difficult. Thus, the world, although it cannot collapse in its sophic basis, but due to its incompleteness, it needs Divine help and guidance for its accomplishment. Therefore, the world cannot be left by God to its own destinies, and needs God’s help, which is usually called God’s providence over the world. The very being of the world includes becoming, and, moreover, self-becoming, for the world in man must itself realize its sophicity. But God’s providence is not a new creation of the world, because the world has already been created, and it is not its implementation on new foundations, as if after the failure of the first creation, for all completeness was put into the world at its creation, and there can no longer be new foundations for it. Therefore, God, providing for the world, leaves the originality of the world indestructible, but helps it only in its formation, in which the world is not finished. The world is too unstable in itself to manage without this help. However, this help can be carried out not through intervention in the life of the world from the outside, not by the power of divine omnipotence, or by cosmic miracles over the world, but only from within the world itself, by influencing its laws through the freedom of created beings. God influences the natural world through angels who guard and guide the world (as is clearly shown in the images of the Apocalypse); God influences the human world (and through it the natural world) through the human soul, through its freedom, which is fraught with different possibilities. This influence can be defined in the most general sense as grace, that is, instilling in a person divine thought and will and through this bringing his will and actions into agreement with the thought of God. In this interaction of God with the world, in the constant communication of God’s grace to him, God’s love for creation is expressed, and at the same time God’s condescension. By providing for the world, God actually enters into its temporality, and this intervention of God in the life of the world is in itself a constant creativity, although it is no longer creation from nothing, but interaction. If the time of the world is real for God, then in what relation does it stand to the omniscience of God? Doesn't this violate the latter? However, God's omniscience should not be understood anthropomorphically, as knowledge of all parts of existence in time and space, that is, knowledge of it as multiplicity. For God, the world appears as a total unity, the connection of everything with everything, not in the pre-establishment of events, but in the general connection or certainty (and in this sense, the pre-establishment) of the whole. This “pre-establishment” of the world is its sophia: posited on the basis of Sophia, it has to become Sophia, this is his ontological law of being and in this sense a pre-established necessity. He was created for the completeness of his being, but there is no other being, and all its elements are given from the beginning. But this general pre-establishment of givenness does not extend to becoming, in which created freedom participates. Here, for time, there is no pre-establishment, and God, in His providence, responds with His saving influence to every question of the existence of the world, which is every act of created freedom. Created freedom is real as the world, for it is the image of its formation, it is laid down by God as a condition for the implementation of its sophia. Therefore, the regularity of world existence, with the unity and pre-establishment of the basis as purposeful causality, includes an infinite number of possibilities for implementation. Spinoza-Kant's idea that the pattern of the world is similar to the movement of a flying arrow or a solar eclipse or astronomical phenomena in general does not correspond at all to concrete reality. Of course, all self-determinations and acts of freedom, when implemented, enter into the chain of world causality and become immanent to it. But causality itself through freedom is a varying principle in the paths of world law. And no matter how insignificant these options may be, they do not allow it to be a purely mechanical pattern. And it is at the point of freedom of the created world, that is, in man, that the grace of God, God’s providence, acts, straightening and leveling the world’s own curve with Divine wisdom, without destruction or disruption of the life of this world. The world never remains immanent to itself, closed in itself, but is always open to the divine influence that takes place within the world and leads it to a good goal. The world cannot resist this influence - not because of the creative omnipotence of God, which God no longer applies in relation to the once created world, but because of the Divine mind, which reveals to the world in man its own path, its own sophic law. Divine providence operates over the world within the limits of variations of its free creative causality, which contains an infinite number of possibilities, and for each given case the best opportunity is chosen to guide Divine providence. God never leaves the world He created without providing for it, however, while observing its own laws. That is why God’s relationship to the world is defined as interaction. And if these actions are sometimes described in anthropomorphic images (as, for example, in the story of the flood, where God says about Himself: “I will bring a flood of water on the earth to destroy all flesh... I will pour rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights,” “and God brought a wind on the earth,” Gen. 6, 7), then this must be understood, of course, not in the sense of new creative acts of God, but of His providential action above the elements, obedient to Him, - however, within the limits of the life of the world itself. That is, here the thought is expressed precisely about the interaction between God and the world, on the basis of which God’s Providence operates in the world. For God knows His creation and all its ways, and He laid down the law of its existence. And by virtue of it, with all the variations of created freedom and divine providential vision, the world realizes its entelechy goal, its sophic becoming / for which it was created by God, in the image of the Divine world. 282 This means that the world cannot accommodate another being other than the one that was predetermined for it at its creation (just as a person, “being anxious, cannot add to his stature, even by one cubit,” Matt. 6:27), but he can and must accommodate the entire fullness of this being. However, we would incorrectly, still deistically, understand the relationship between God and the world if we defined it only as the action of God in the natural world, on the assumption of its closedness and self-sufficiency, or complete cosmic immanence. Such self-closed cosmism is the desire of the imaginary “prince of this world,” who wants to delight the world for himself and become a false god for it. But the world is not only not closed in itself, but is intended, with the complete inviolability of its own existence as a world and a creature, for communication and reunification with God, the limit of which is “God will be all in all,” that is, the complete deification of creation. God created the world not only for self-revelation in it, for the manifestation of the Divine Sophia in created Sophia, but also for spiritual, personal communication with him through people and angels. The world is complex in its composition, for in its created nature it has divinely uncreated human and angelic spirits, and through them God himself descends into the world. In the human spirit the world is open to Divine grace, inspiration, life. And in this general sense, the world is already divine-human at its core. Divine and created life at this point of world existence are united and identified, and from here emanate the rays of the deification of the world. Through the human soul in creation there is a personal meeting with God, God’s self-revelation takes place, a direct influence occurs God, super-mundane, super-creative, free from the immanent laws of the world - grace. In the human monad, windows are open to eternity, to heaven, for it itself is the image of God. Therefore, in man (and through him in the world) there is a double life, a double process. This deification of man is not an act of ontological violence against him, for in his essence he has the image of God; moreover, he is the image of God, which is naturally boundlessly identified, although never merging, with the Prototype. This is a postulate of humanity, and in it of all created being, for man is the high priest of all creation. This expresses the divine-human basis of creation. God created the whole world in its fullness and beauty, but He created only man for communication with Himself. If we compare the creation and the Creator, like “clay and the potter,” then we can say that man, like the last blade of grass in creation, is separated by the same abyss from his Creator, and from this point of view it would seem that God could choose Balaam’s donkey for His communication no less than the prophet himself, by the power of His power over the world (as is shown in the biblical story, Num. 22–24), or as an instrument for His will. However, being immeasurably far from God, like every creation from its Creator, man - and only man in the world and only through him the world itself - is close to God as His image, is in destiny the son of God and the friend of God. Through man, divine life comes into the world. Therefore, the history of mankind begins with direct communication with God: according to the figurative expression of the Bible, God comes to paradise in the cool of the day to talk with man, and the trial of fallen man is still depicted as a conversation with God. And the memory of paradise, the rays of the original divine revelation are preserved by fallen man in the so-called. natural revelation. Although fallen man, having lost direct communion with God, thereby became a cosmic being, the image of God present in man makes him a religious being, and man does not remain deprived of some of the rudiments of God-consciousness, as well as knowledge of God, even in his natural state (and even the rampant atheism of our days is negative evidence of this: man wants to expel from himself that which is inextricable). Humanity, after expulsion from paradise, being deprived of direct communication with God, seeks God, both for itself and in the world. It already finds him in the Sophia image, but the human spirit cannot be satisfied with the Sophia nature of nature, which has on itself the stamp of the spirit, its revelation, but not the spirit itself - for after all, nature is soulless. And therefore, a person, doomed only to natural worship of God, is led by the force of things to pagan naturalism: the natural elements of the animal and material world are accepted as deities only because they are revelations about God in their sophistry. In the same way, man, as the image of God, in the fullness of his powers, but also in the damage of his fallen nature, himself becomes a god for man. Thus, fallen humanity in its sophia, on the one hand, has a natural revelation about God, but, on the other, almost inevitably falls into religious aberrations, with its inability to distinguish between the divine and the created, and, moreover, the sinfully created. This desire of man to rise above the world, to overcome cosmism is touching, but his powerlessness to achieve this is also tragic. But if paganism did not have the direct revelation of God, God’s word, does this mean that it was completely devoid of the breath of the Spirit of God, which “breathes wherever it wants”? There is no biblical or theological basis for a negative answer to this question. Ap. Paul (Rom. 1:19) says about the pagans: “what can be known about God is obvious to them, for God has shown it to them.” The last words testify to more than just the revelation of God “through the examination of creation” (20), but also to a certain active phenomenon, which can be understood as a special religious inspiration, a breath of the Holy Spirit. And in order to deny the ego, no dogmatic grounds can be given - on the contrary, it is impossible to allow (and does not correspond to the church recognition of pagan “Christians before Christ”, a “pagan”, albeit “non-fertile” church) such an exclusion of all humanity from all grace, for, according to the word of St. Peter, “God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to Him” (Acts 10:24). 283 Paganism is therefore not only a history of religious errors, but also a positive religious process that knows its revelations. But all these revelations belong to the realm of the Divine Sophia, which reveals itself in the world; they relate to hypostasis, but not to the hypostasis of God itself. They are cosmic and religiously immanent, for they do not contain a personal meeting of God with man and His personal revelation about Himself, which is already the action of God in man. Revealed religion is conditioned by the personal action of God in man, as if by a return to that heavenly state when God talked with man, and man was able to hear God and endure His scorching proximity, pati Deum. No matter how deep the fall of man was in the sense of the weakening of his spirituality and the associated corruption of his nature, the image of God was inviolably preserved in him as the basis of communication with God. And the very fact of revelation testifies more than anything else to this inviolability. God reveals himself to man “in many parts and in various ways” (Heb. 1:1), and all this revelation comes down to two images: God speaks to man, and He inspires him. It is revealed to Him as the word of God and the action of the Spirit. This refers to the content of revelation, which is clothed in forms of God’s action and signs accessible to man. This revelation is, in the ways of God's vision, not universal, but limited. The chosen people, a small island of salvation, rises from the depths of the pagan sea, and in a land overgrown with weeds and tares, the Lord builds and fences His vineyard, creates the Old Testament church in order to live with it in personal communication and revelation. In the person of the patriarchs who pleased God, Noah, Abraham, etc., as well as the prophet Moses, God speaks to man, appears to him, gives him tangible signs of His presence in theophanies, gives the law and establishes the worship of God. He directs the course of the history of the chosen people, making it the sacred history of their upbringing in order to serve in the economy of salvation. We do not need to dwell here on the particular features of this history, but we cannot avoid the question: Who was the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”, who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, who gave the law at Sinai in the service of angels? 284 The providence of the world, as well as its creation, is the work of the entire Holy Trinity, however, with a difference in the special action of each of the hypostases. In the writings of the Fathers, there is a widespread opinion that God, revealed in the Old Testament, is the Logos, acting in the world before His incarnation (this opinion, of course, is incompatible with the imaginary scheme according to which the Old Testament is the revelation of the Father, just as the New Testament is the revelation of the Son). Father in St. The Trinity has a revealing and a non-revealing hypostasis, and it is revealed in the Son. Even in the New Testament, the Father reveals himself in the Son, while remaining transcendental to the world, without appearing in it. And this transcendence of the Father in creation retains its power all the more in the Old Testament. If the Father creates the world with His Word, then he also provides for it, and is revealed to him through the same Word. Therefore, the immediate divine subject of the Old Testament is the same as that of the New Testament, the Second Hypostasis, the Logos. He is the demiurgic hypostasis par excellence, and to Him belongs the economy of salvation. Moreover, the Old Testament revelation of God to man, being divine in its source and content, was at the same time human, because it otherwise could not have been perceived by man and would have remained transcendental to him. In other words, it was already divine-human - the divine-humanity of the Word here anticipates the hypostatic appearance of the Logos. However, the revelation of the Word in the Holy Trinity is accomplished in dual unity with the revelation of the Holy Spirit resting on Him. Therefore, the Old Testament revelation could not remain only the revelation of the Word, that is, one teaching, without the direct, perfect influence of the Holy Spirit, through inspiration by this word. And indeed, we know that the Holy Spirit acted in various gifts in the Old Testament and “spoke to the prophets.” The revelation of the Word in man has never been and could never be a mechanical message from the outside, like a dictation, but precisely inspiration. And therefore the Spirit descended on the prophets who spoke the Word of God, and in its own; they uttered it with inspiration. One might even say that the inspiration of the Spirit preceded the revelation of the Word, constituting a condition for the latter. This corresponds to the fact that in the Holy Trinity the Spirit rests on the Son and reveals the Son. In created revelation, this order is naturally reversed: first the Spirit for the perception of the Word, and then the Word. In prophetic books it is sometimes directly noted: “a spirit entered into me... and I heard the Lord speaking to me” (Jer. 2:2). But when it is not directly noted, it is implied. Without the overshadowing of the Spirit of God, a person cannot see and hear God. Thus, the God of the Old Testament is the revelation of the Holy Trinity, the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit. 285 And only through these hypostases do we have the hidden manifestation of the Father, moreover, in the image of God human, i.e. in accordance with the filial, precisely in the vision of the prophet. Daniel, in the appearance of the Ancient of Days, to which the Son of Man is brought (Dan. 7) and in the appearance of three angels (which, however, some fathers also understand as the appearance of the Logos with two angels). The Holy Spirit is not revealed in the Old Testament as a hypostasis, the Divine Self, and in the personal Yahweh of the Holy One. The Trinity is converted by the hypostasis of the Logos. In the Old Testament we have not only the hypostatic revelation of the Logos and the gracious revelation of the Holy Spirit, but also the revelation of the Divine Sophia. This is the manifestation of the Glory of God to Moses, Ezekiel, and also Isaiah, and this corresponds to the direct revelation of Wisdom: Prov. Sol. 8–9, Job. 28, Prem. Sol. 7 words The Glory of God is Heavenly Wisdom, in the image of which the human world was created, and therefore it is human and can be contained in revelation to man (which is why the apostles could see the Glory in the Transfiguration of the Lord). But Wisdom - Glory is not only human, but it is heavenly humanity itself, and in this humanity it is revealed in the Old Testament. It is in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of glory that the image of a man enters into its manifestation: “above the likeness of a throne was the likeness of a man above on it” (Ezek. 1:26). And this manifestation of the humanity of Glory is at the same time the Heavenly Adam, the Son of God - the Son of Man, the God-Man, the Coming Christ. This image has already been completely introduced into the vision of the prophet. Daniel (chapter 7) about the Son of Man being brought to the Ancient of Days. This is the Old Testament Gospel about the God-Man, and it also anticipates his New Testament name - Son of Man, which Christ applied to Himself on earth. Here He is seen in heaven (“as if the Son of Man walked with the clouds of heaven,” 7:13). And it is precisely this connection between earth and heaven in the Son of Man that Christ himself confirms in his conversation with Nicodemus: “no one has ascended into heaven except the Son of Man who is in heaven” (John 3:13). Along with this direct revelation about the divine humanity of man, the Old Testament was also filled with indirect revelations, in the form of “types and prophecies,” revealed only in the New Testament. Such, first of all, was the tabernacle with all its institutions (as revealed in the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 9) and much more: persons, events, symbols. 2. Grounds for the Incarnation The coming of Christ into the world, the incarnation of God, according to the direct testimony of the Word of God, was predetermined even before the creation of the world, i.e., the eternal advice of God about the world was included. Christ is “a lamb without blemish and without spot, predestined before the foundation of the world, but who appeared in the last times for us” (1 Peter 1:20). In this was revealed “the wisdom of God, secret, hidden, which God ordained before the ages for our glory” (1 Cor. 2:7). In Christ, God chose us “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), “predestinated us as sons to Himself through Jesus Christ, for the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, with which He has graced us in the Beloved” (5-6). In this, God reveals “the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He ordained in Him in the dispensation of the fulness of times, that all things in heaven and on earth might be united under the head of Christ” (9–10). And this is “the dispensation of the mystery that was hidden from eternity in God, who made all things through Jesus Christ, so that now through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in heaven, according to the eternal purpose which He fulfilled in Christ Jesus our Lord” (3:9-11). And in this sense, the Lord Jesus is called in the Apocalypse “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (Rev. 1, 8, 10, 17; 2, 8; 22, 13). In God’s eternal plan, His love for creation was manifested, which did not stop at the creation of the world, but went further than that, namely “as an act of new creation of the world, it determined the descent of God himself into the world, that is, the incarnation of God. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son... that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17). “The love of God for us was revealed in this, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, so that we might receive life through Him... Let us love Him, because He first loved us” (1 John 49:1). From these texts it is clear that the coming of the Son into the world is only an act of God’s providential view of the world, which stems from the interaction of God with the world, but is the original favor of God, existing “before” the very creation of the world, i.e. constituting its very basis and purpose. We can say that God created the world, intending to be incarnated in it, for the sake of this incarnation. It is not only a means of redemption, but its highest accomplishment even in comparison with its creation. In His incarnation He showed His love for creation. The most general and preliminary question that arises here is whether the incarnation is only a means of redemption and reconciliation of God with man, i.e., in this sense, a consequence of the Fall (“tu felix Aqae culpa!”), a soteriological act, or whether it in a certain sense does not depend on it, being pre-established in itself. This is how this question is usually posed in theology and patristics, and it is answered in both senses, and, however, the predominant (especially in patristics) is the soteriological understanding of the incarnation. In the Word of God, in addition to the texts already cited, it is also often depicted as the salvation of man from sin with the sacrificial acceptance of the sins of the world by the Lamb of God. This corresponds to the actual concrete accomplishment of the Incarnation of God, “for us for man’s sake and for our salvation.” However, the first half of this formula of the symbol, “for our sake, man,” also has a more general meaning than its particular use in the second half, “and for our salvation.” Likewise, in the above texts, it is not the immediate, redemptive goal of the incarnation that is indicated, but the final, universal one: “in order to unite everything in heaven and earth under the head of Christ.” In the comparison of these two goals there is no either-or, but there is both-and, or even, more precisely, the soteriological task is included in the eschatological one, as a means in an end: redemption is the path to “our glory.” Therefore, perhaps, the best solution to the question of whether the Incarnation would have occurred apart from the Fall is to eliminate the question itself as a casus irrealis, or as an inappropriate anthropomorphism in relation to the works of God. The Incarnation of God took place in all its meaning, as it was established from eternity in God’s council, but it happened for the sake of fallen humanity. As a result of this fall, it became, first of all, a means of salvation and redemption, retaining, however, the fullness of its meaning even beyond the boundaries of redemption, for it is not exhausted by the latter. The casus irrealis here consists in the assumption that God might not have become incarnate if man had not sinned; the Incarnation of God is thereby made dependent on man and, moreover, on his fall, on original sin, and ultimately even on the serpent. On the contrary, in the above testimonies of the word of God, the mystery of God’s incarnation is predetermined “before the creation of the world,” that is, it expresses the most basic and defining attitude of God towards the world, and not only to a private, although important for us, event in his life. God created the world for the incarnation of God, and it was not the world that forced the incarnation of God from God through the fall of man. In the last assumption there is a clear incommensurability of scale. Nevertheless, the specific incarnation of God took place precisely as redemption, and it should be understood by us as such. In this regard, they often also refer to God’s foreknowledge, for which the fall of man was known in advance, why God created the world, including his plan in advance of the incarnation. Such reasoning is not ontological and anthropomorphic, and this last feature is further strengthened by the assumption that God could save man in other ways besides the incarnation. Here God is humanly credited with choosing different means and possibilities. What is indisputable is that the created world in its createdness concealed the possibility of fall. But God, nevertheless, decided to create a world that contained within itself the possibility of falling away from God in its freedom. And as a response to this very possibility, God pre-eternally accepted His decree about the Lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the world, therefore, to a certain extent and regardless of whether this possibility becomes reality. God, so to speak, took upon Himself in advance responsibility for the possible fall of man, who is changeable in his creatureliness. However, this implies only the possibility of a fall, but by no means its pre-establishment, which would transfer the very responsibility for the fall of the creature to the Creator. But if this possibility is not a necessity that would be equivalent to the necessity of the incarnation, decided in the Divine Council,” then we have to admit that the incarnation expresses God’s attitude to the world more general than just redemption, although it is in fact redemption. Therefore, we should first consider the incarnation in its general ontological foundations. What is its immutable pre-establishment? It stems from God’s general relationship to the world, which is His outward-flowing love for creation. This love, the nature of which is sacrifice, is self-denying for the world not only in that it posits the existence of the world along with God, making God correlative to the world, and not only in that God creates the world in man in His image, and by the power of this conformity the Divine Sophia is revealed in the world, but God, as a Person, comes into personal communication with man. God wants to communicate His divine life to the world and to inhabit the world himself, to become a man, in order to make man a god. This exceeds the limits of all human imagination and boldness, this is the mystery of God’s love, “hid from eternity in God” (Eph. 3:9) and unknown even to the angels (Eph. 3:10, 1 Peter 1:12, 1 Tim. 3:16). There is no limit to God’s love, and it cannot fail to reach its end in the fullness of God’s self-sacrifice for the world, which is the incarnation of God. And if the obstacle here is not the very being of the world, and its creation called from non-existence, then its fallen state is not it either. God also comes into the fallen world, God’s love does not disdain not only the weakness of creation, but also its fallen image, the sinfulness of the world, and condescends to take upon itself its sins: the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, appears in it. Thus, everything is given by God for the deification of the world and its salvation, and nothing more remains that has not been given. Such is the love of God, such is Love. This is how it is in intra-Trinitarian life, in the mutual giving of three hypostases, and this is how it is in God’s relationship to the world. If we understand the Incarnation in this way, and this is how Christ teaches us to understand it (Jn. 3:17), then the very basis for puzzling questions about whether the Incarnation would have occurred apart from the Fall is eliminated. The greater includes the lesser, the subsequent presupposes the preceding, and the concrete embraces the general. God's love for fallen man, which does not stop before accepting Adam's fallen nature, of course, already includes love for intact man. And this is expressed in the wisdom of the short words of the Nicene Symbol: “for our sake man and for our salvation.” This, in all its ambiguity and vastness of meaning, contains the theology of the incarnation. This is precisely what can be understood in the sense of identification (as “that is”) - this is precisely what is understood by those who consider salvation to be the basis of the incarnation of God, and specifically, in fact, for fallen man this is exactly what it means. But this can also be understood in a distinctive sense (i.e., as “and in particular,” etc.), dividing the general and the particular, that is, the power of the incarnation without limiting or exhausting it with atonement alone. “The word became flesh” must be accepted in the entire scope of its content: theologically, cosmically, anthropologically, christologically, and soteriologically. The latter, as the most concrete, includes, but does not exclude, all these meanings, which is why it is wrong to limit the theology of the Incarnation to the boundaries of soteriology, and this is impossible, as the history of dogma testifies. The Incarnation presupposes the presence of “flesh,” that is, the created world, and in it man, in all his indestructibility. In the Incarnation, God does not create the world out of nothing with His omnipotence, but has before Himself the image of the world put into existence. It, being a new Divine act in the world, is not an ontological violence against it, which even the Love of God cannot allow. The Incarnation is the revelation of God's image in creation, which is ready to meet the descending Divinity. God cannot incarnate or unite with every creation: neither an angel, nor an animal, nor minerals, nor things can contain the Divinity, with all the boundlessness of God's omnipotence, for here it is silent. The Incarnation is not an act of God above the world, but in the world. It has not one, but two sides: the world accepting God in the person of man, and God seeking this acceptance. The boundlessness of God’s self-sacrifice, His self-abasement before creation here reaches the point that the incarnation itself depends not only on God, who wants it in His love for creation, but also on this latter, both in its nature and in its freedom. The creature must be capable of receiving God and worthy of receiving it, having desired Him with its will (“two wills” in God-manhood even before the incarnation). The Incarnation is also the internal basis of creation, its purposeful cause. God created the world not in order to keep it from Himself in that insurmountable metaphysical distance at which the Creator is separated from creation, but in order to overcome this distance and completely unite with the world, not only from the outside, like the Creator and even the Provider, but also from the inside: “The Word became flesh.” Therefore, the incarnation of God is already predestined in man. The image of God-manhood in man is imprinted on his entire mental-physical organism. With his body, a person belongs to the created world, which he has within himself, unites and generalizes, like a contracted world, a microcosm. In his soul, animal man lives the life of this world, and this latter lives in pcs. The soul is the created principle in man, which connects him with the entire animal world, i.e. living the life of this world. Of course, the human soul is at the highest stage of development of the world in a number of different stages at which the souls of different animals stand. The human soul is “reasonable”; it contains within itself those abilities that a person needs to live in this world: reason or lower intelligence, which in human awakening makes up for the lack of instincts characteristic of animals and which constitute their super-animal wisdom. A carnal or “spiritual” person has all the abilities to live in this world, like a higher animal. There is spiritual wisdom: it “is not wisdom coming from above,” but – in its various aspects – “earthly, spiritual, demonic” (Jas. 3:15), therefore there may be “natural people who do not have spirit” (Jude 19), about whom it is said that “a natural person does not understand the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14). However, if this soulfulness in a bad, autocratic use represents a hostile denial, opposition to the spirituality inherent in man, then in a normal relationship, soulfulness is the basis of spiritual life, its possibility, and in this sense it is said about a person: “not the spiritual first, but the spiritual, then the spiritual” (1 Cor. 15:46). Soulfulness in a person, occupying a proper, hierarchical relationship to the spirit for which it is a pedestal, represents the life of the world in a person. But just as the created world was created in the image of the divine world, there is a created Sophia, then in the mental-physical organism of man, through which his life is identified with the life of the world, the sophia of man is revealed in this sense. Of all the created faces of sophia, only in man is it fully realized: man, in his relation to the world, as a microcosm, the compressed world, is created Sophia, and, as such, bears the image of God, for just as God has the Divine Sophia or the world, so man has it in himself, as the image of the entire created world. However, the image of God in man, revealed in his relationship to the world, would be incomplete and even completely distorted if this sophia was expressed only in his spiritual animality. For in God, having existence in itself as the Divine world, the Divine Sophia is eternally hypostasized, belonging to the Trinitarian Divine spirit. The Spirit is the unity of hypostasis and nature, and Sophia is the nature of the divine Spirit and, as such, is inseparable from it, belongs to it, and does not dominate in itself. In man, as the image of God, this attitude of the Divine Sophia to the hypostatic spirit also finds a correspondence. Man, by his creation, which establishes the normal hierarchy of soul and spirit, in his soul has an abode for his uncreated, divine in origin and therefore immortal, hypostatic spirit, and in this sense he himself is an embodied spirit or spiritualized flesh. Under the normal ratio, which is pre-established for man at his creation, the spirit is the guiding principle that dominates the “flesh”. He retreated from this norm in his fall, plunging into soulfulness, and then into physicality. This normal ratio for man is restored by the Second Adam Christ, the spiritual man. “There is a spiritual body, and there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: the first man Adam became a living soul (Gen. 2:7), the last Adam is a life-giving Spirit, but not the spiritual first, but the natural, then the spiritual” (1 Cor. 15:44-6). The second Adam is also the first normal person, who realized in himself the ontological image of man, revealing the truth about him. And if a person bears within himself the image of the God-man, then vice versa, the God-man Christ himself is Man: “one man Jesus” (Rom. 5:15), “the first man from the earth, the second man the Lord from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47). The prototype of man in his sophia is Divine Humanity or the Heavenly God-Humanity of the Logos, Sophia, the Divine World reflected in the created. In the Holy Trinity, the Logos, the Second Hypostasis, as the self-revelation of the Father, is Sophia par excellence - and the Prototype of man, Adam, is the image of the Logos in Sophia. So, the foundations for the incarnation of the Logos are already laid in the very creation of man, who, as it were, awaits the acceptance of the Logos and calls upon him. This is a person’s inner call to heaven, his determination, which, however, cannot be realized by himself, but only by God, for it exceeds the limits of the world and man. For this reason alone, the incarnation cannot be understood only soteriologically, as a means for the restoration of fallen man, deliberately found by the Providence of God. After the fall of man, the incarnation became, indeed, first of all, a means for his restoration, but this means is included, only as a particular possibility, in the general relationship between God and man. We do not have any data to judge how this relationship would be revealed in a person who had not fallen. But even in the consciousness of fallen Adam, this desire for union with God was expressed in the aspirations of the Redeemer (Job 19:25–7) and in the highest prophetic insights of the Incarnation. This is Isaiah’s prophecy about Emmanuel - God is with us, which the Evangelist interprets as a prophecy about the incarnation of God (Matthew 1:23). Of course, prophecy is spoken by the Holy Spirit, but He reveals what is hidden and contained in man himself and, according to the power of this, can be contained by him. The entire Old Testament is filled with foreknowledge of the mystery of the Incarnation and its prototypes. What has been said contains sufficient grounds for answering the question that is sometimes raised in patristics and dogmatics: why was it the Son of God who became incarnate, and not another hypostasis of the Holy Trinity? Since human why is appropriate here? - and it is still appropriate to the extent that man, as the image of God, bears within himself a living revelation of the Divine - usually the answer is given in the sense that the Son is incarnated as a demiurgic hypostasis, the Logos of the world, in whom all things were, as the one who reveals this divine Everything in the Father. Logos is in this sense the hypostatic Wisdom of the Father, revealing itself in the Divine Sophia, and then in the created world. This foreshadows the embodiment of the hypostasis of the Logos. Incarnation, on the contrary, is completely excluded for the hypostasis of the Father due to its general transcendence, both in the Holy Trinity and in creation. The Father is revealed through the Son in the Holy Spirit, while remaining closed in Himself. In the Holy Trinity, the Father eternally begets the Son, coming upon Him in the Holy Spirit; in creation He creates the world with His Word and completes it with the Holy Spirit. In both cases, the Father's hypostasis is the subject of revelation, but not revelation itself. In Him is the inexpressible and inexperienced Mystery of the Divinity, which becomes manifest in the Son and the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the Father gives birth to the Son and sends Him into the world. He is the first will, He is the power and the beginning, but the world knows Him Himself only in the Son, and this not only at the beginning of creation, but also at its completion. The Holy Spirit is also not incarnated hypostatically, although He is also a cosmourgic hypostasis by which the creative Word is accomplished. Being inseparable from the Logos in the Divine Sophia, the hypostasis of the Spirit in this dyad of hypostases revealing the Father occupies second place (and third place in the entire Holy Trinity). Its action presupposes the already accomplished revelation of the Word (and in the Holy Trinity its pre-eternal birth). The third hypostasis takes part in the incarnation of God together with the Second, namely, the incarnation itself is its own work through the sanctification of human flesh by descending on the Virgin Mary, on the Infant of God, and then on Christ, baptized in the waters of the Jordan. However, the participation of the Holy Spirit in the matter of incarnation is complete. Their relationship in the matter of incarnation can be defined this way: the Son is incarnated as a Person, while the Holy Spirit participates in the incarnation through the “flesh” sanctified by Him, i.e. mental-physical humanity (as with the creation of the first earth, which was destined to become the mother-matter for the creation of man “from the dust of the earth.” The Spirit of God hovered “over the waters,” anticipating His future descent on the Ever-Virgin). If the mystery of the Incarnation is expressed by grammatical analogy, then the participation of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation is a connection (is) connecting the subject (Hypostasis of the Logos) with Himself in His Word, which is the world’s everything. In order for the hypostasis of the Logos, his Divine Self, to become a hypostasis for created being, it is necessary that this created being itself, the word of the Word in creation, unite with the Divine hypostasis and rise to this union. Ego is on the side of creation and is carried out by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the incarnation of God should not be understood as the work of only one hypostasis of the Logos; it necessarily involves the participation of both hypostases? Moreover, one hypostasis incarnates itself, becoming a subject for the creature, while the other, without itself incarnating, however, for the sake of the incarnation of the Logos, descends on the Virgin Mary, and then in general is sent into the world by the Father through the Son, in the revelation and final accomplishment of the power of incarnation. This inseparability of both hypostases in the incarnation is attested in the symbol with the words: “and he became man by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.” Here the idea is expressed with all clarity that the incarnation of God consists of two acts: the infusion of the Divine hypostasis into a person and his acceptance of it. The first is the own work of the Logos, sent into the world by the Father, the second is the work of the Holy Spirit, also sent by the Father to the Virgin Mary, in whose flesh the incarnation takes place. Therefore, this should in no way be understood as some kind of paternity of the Holy Spirit, supposedly replacing the absence of a husband; on the contrary, it is, as it were, a well-known identification of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary in the conception of the Son: the Virgin Mary conceives the Son because the Holy Spirit rests in Her and on Her, and not by Her human power. But precisely because the Holy Spirit. participates in the incarnation of God, and this participation is its necessary condition; one’s own incarnation of the Third Hypostasis is completely excluded. It does not correspond to the image of hypostatic incarnation, which, on the contrary, fully corresponds to the Second Hypostasis, as hypostatic sonship. Sonship is a hypostatic kenosis in the Holy Trinity, and the Son of God is a kenotic hypostasis, the eternal Lamb. And this eternal kenosis of sonship is the common basis for that kenosis of the Son, which is the incarnation - “the great mystery of piety: God appeared in the flesh” (I Tim. 3, 16). No matter how we understand the general connection between the incarnation and the fall of man, however, this latter, being, on the one hand, the concrete basis for the incarnation, was at the same time an obstacle for it. The Logos could not accept the flesh, stained by the Fall, aggravated by original sin, just as this sinful flesh could not find in itself either the will or the strength to accept the incarnation. If Adam’s first movement after the Fall was to “hide” from the face of the Lord (Gen. 3:8), then among his descendants this feeling was confirmed, turning into a trembling consciousness: “we will die, for we have seen God” (Judges 13:22), and Moses spoke with surprise about himself to the people: “today we saw that God speaks to man, and this one remains alive” (Deut. 6:24), as did Isaiah cries out about the theophany that took place to him: “Woe is me, I am lost... my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts” (Isaiah 6:5). And the Lord himself testifies to this alienation of man from God, which replaced the heavenly opportunity of direct conversation with God: “You cannot see My face, because man cannot see Me and live” (Ex. 33:20). In order for the creature to be able to incline to accept the incarnation, it was necessary to overcome this creaturely trepidation of the “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3), the “enemies” of God (Rom. 5:10), with love for the Lord, for only “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). But the only way to this is to overcome sin, which alienates us from the Lord. For liberation from original sin and reconciliation with God, which could only be achieved through the incarnation of God, it was necessary to weaken this sin to the point of making it ineffective, although not invalid. This happened in the Most Pure Virgin Mary, whose appearance in the world was the main task of the Old Testament church. In the Old Testament church, for centuries and millennia, the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit accumulated. The Spirit's hereditary holiness, which, being tested by destinies and temptations and nurtured by the entire grace-filled life of the Church, rose higher and higher above the level of fallen humanity. Thus, from ancient times, on the created-human side, the incarnation of God was prepared by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, by the action of the Third Hypostasis. The pinnacle of this holiness was reached in St. The Virgin, whose purity was already such that She appeared “grace-filled,” overshadowed even before the Incarnation by the incessant illumination of the Holy Spirit. It was in Her that original sin turned out to be weakened, as an obstacle to the incarnation of God. Being personally sinless, She was not subject to the power of original sin, although it lived in Her as a universal human destiny, as a hereditary disease of all human nature, which She carried within Her. But he and Ney were reduced to pure potency, without influencing her will. 286 Her personal sinlessness opened the way to the constant influence of the Holy Spirit on Her. In the fallen, sinful world, She already revealed the pristine Sophia image of man, although she was united by carnal and spiritual ties with fallen humanity and in Her love for him shared his sinful illness. Her holy soul, pre-chosen from time immemorial in the bosom of the Lord, entered the world, according to the will of God, taking flesh from the “God-fathers”, who carried in their loins the successive holiness of all Israel. Her coming into the world, predetermined from eternity, was the appearance of the “Wife” with whom enmity was ordained by God for Satan (Gen. 3:15). And when She reached such spiritual strength that she could bear the direct and immediate insemination of the Holy Spirit, not in individual grace-filled gifts with which She was already abundantly adorned, but in the acceptance of Him Himself in the fullness of His divine nature, the incarnation took place. The archangel Gabriel was sent by God (of course, God the Father, the Beginning) to announce to Her the divine advice: “The Holy Spirit will come upon You, and the Power of the Most High will overshadow You.” The Holy Spirit, eternally in the Holy. The Trinity overshadowing the Son descends into the created world and carries out this overshadowing of Him already in creation. Rev. The Virgin becomes the sky, and her womb is the place of overshadowing, which also contains the Overshadowed - the born God-Word. And to the question of God, proposed to Her through the archangel, does she want to serve the incarnation of God, to receive God? - The virgin answers: “Behold the servant of the Lord, let it be done to me according to your word.” The “New Eve” does not seek to hide among the trees from the face of God, but obediently proceeds to receive the Lord. In response, Rev. The Mother of God manifested the same created human freedom that, in the person of Eve and then Adam, was determined against the will of God. But now the creature in the person of Rev. The Mother of God exercises this freedom not in self-will, but in obedience to love and self-denial. Motherhood is the human side of God's incarnation, a condition without which it could not be accomplished. The sky could not bow to the earth if the earth did not accept the sky. Therefore the Most Rev. The Virgin Mary is the pre-eternally provided and pre-established center of the created world. However, we must remember that in general no created holiness would be able to meet God without being reduced to ashes before Him, much less suffer the birth of God. Only God himself could sanctify and deify creation in order to make it strong and worthy of incarnation. If the Son of God incarnates, then he incarnates the Holy Spirit, descending on the Virgin and making Her earthly heaven. Being the Third Hypostasis in the Holy Trinity, following the Second and resting on It, in the matter of incarnation the Holy Spirit by His action precedes the Son who becomes incarnate. Just as in human birth there is first a mother and then a child, so in the Birth of God the Holy Spirit, descending on the Mother of God, gives Her the power of Motherhood. Through the Virgin Mary's acceptance of the Archangel's gospel, the Logos is born as Man, and the Son of God becomes the Son of Man. The Lord continually applies to Himself this title, Son of Man, in all the meaningfulness of its meanings. But for this case, its most direct and immediate meaning is that the incarnation is a certain adoption of the hypostasis of the Logos to the human race. Consequently, here is not a new creation, but inclusion in the already existing human race, origin from it, and the incarnation should not be different, so the name Son of Man is, first of all, evidence of the true humanity of Christ. In an expanded form, so to speak, this name is expressed by the Gospel genealogies, which clearly show the human “fatherland” of Jesus. The first of them (Matt.) depicts Christ (through “Joseph, the husband of Mary”) as the son of Abraham (in descending order), and the second (Luke 3) through Joseph “as they thought, the Father of Jesus” (3, 23), in ascending order, the son of Adam, “the son of God.” Both genealogies testify to Jesus, the Son of God – the Son of Man. This testimony to the authenticity of the humanity of Christ has, of course, a very important soteriological significance, according to the principle: “what is not received is not redeemed.” But here it has meaning, first of all, in relation to the incarnation itself, which is not only the acceptance of men into the race of God, making them Sons of God as a result of redemption, but, first of all, there is also the acceptance of the Son of God into the sons of men, in His incarnation through the birth of the Virgin. The Logos could truly incarnate and become human only by becoming the son of man, that is, by entering into the already existing human race, and not by starting it from himself. True, as the New Adam, Christ begins with Himself a new race of Sons of God, but this is only a renewal of the old, already created, which does not destroy the authenticity of His human genealogy. “The word became flesh” means, first of all, human sonship. This eliminates all docetism in relation to the humanity of the Lord, for the ghostly shadow of humanity cannot be honored by a human son. However, here the “semless conception” without a father, the birth “of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,” may raise bewilderment. Is it compatible with genuine human sonship and is it not abolished by it? The formal answer to this is given by the genealogies, which include Jesus in the family of Joseph, although both evangelists (Matt. 11-16, and Luke 3.23-38) leave no room for doubt that Joseph was not the father of Jesus in the flesh, but, as the husband of Mary, was legally revered as His father even in the eyes of His Mother (Luke 2.48). This inclusion in the clan was not only a legal act, it had for itself the well-known mystical reality of recognition of sonship, adoption, both for parents and for the Son. In relation to carnal birth, Jesus became the Son of Man through His Mother. The absence of an earthly Father and carnal conception, which ontologically obviously does not exclude the possibility of seedless conception from the Mother through the overshadowing of her by the Holy Spirit, does not at all detract from the fact that the “flesh” that Mary gave to the Child is universal human flesh. If it is sometimes called “the likeness of the flesh” (Phil. 2:7), then not in the sense of diminishing its authenticity, but only the absence of sin, original and personal, in it. Birth through carnal union was only a consequence of original sin, instead of an unknown image of spiritual birth, which remained unfulfilled by man before the Fall. Through carnal birth, which corresponds to the sinful state of man, hereditary sin is transmitted, the incarnation of the spirit (“I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins my mother gave birth to me” Ps. 50:7). However, this did not come to man from the beginning, not in his creation, but only in the Fall. God did not create sin, along with all its consequences; they are not ontological in man, but are for him only a modality, which can be eliminated without violating humanity and without diminishing its authenticity. On this basis, Jesus is the true Son of Man, having been born without a human father from the Mother, although in relation to sinful flesh, His flesh, free from original sin, turns out to be only “the likeness of flesh.” This birth can, in a certain sense, be equated to a new creation, in which God himself was instead of the Father. But the first Adam was created by God directly from the “earth”, and therefore he himself is not the son of man, but “God” (Luke 3:28). The new Adam, as the Son of God, but also the Son of Man, could no longer be created directly from the earth, but was born from the Virgin Mother, carrying within himself all human nature, except for sin, which does not belong to the essence of man. The two names of Jesus that we find in the Gospel: “Son of God” and “Son of Man,” together express the mystery of God-manhood. And first of all, it is striking that both names speak differently about the same thing: sonship. 287 It is the Son who is the kenotic hypostasis in the Holy Trinity itself, as in the creation of the world and in the sending into the world. And in the fact that the incarnate Logos becomes the Son of Man, one cannot help but see the unfolding kenosis of sonship - the divine obedience of the Word. He, the Creator of the world par excellence, as a demiurgic hypostasis, comes into this world created by Him not as the Creator, but as a creation bound by the regularity of this world and man created by Himself. The Son of God, the New Adam, comes into the world differently from Adam the first man, who was the forefather of man, and not a son (although the son of God, Luke 3:38). He becomes the Son of Man in order to be our brother and fellow man, having cognized everything human in Himself, having gone through all his experience, as it is said in the hymn of the Incarnation in the last. to Heb. 2:10-18: “For it was fitting that He, for whom are all things and from whom are all things, bringing many sons to glory, the leader of their salvation, should accomplish through suffering. For both he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from One; therefore He is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying: “I will proclaim Your name to My brothers, in the midst of the church I will sing Your praises” (Ps. 21:23). And again: “I will trust in Him,” and again: “here am I and the children whom God has given me” (Is. 7:17-8). And since children partake of flesh and blood, He also received them, in order by death to deprive him of the power of the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil... For He does not receive angels, but He receives the seed of Abraham. Therefore, He must become like the brethren in everything, in order to be a merciful and faithful High Priest before God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people, for just as He Himself endured being tempted, He is able to help those who are tempted.” After a century-long dogmatic struggle, the Church established at the IV Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon the main Christological dogma about the God-Man (although this expression is not used in the Chalcedonian definition itself, which simply speaks of Christ). The content of the Chalcedonian dogma is that in the structure of the God-man Christ we have not a simple relationship, as in the Divinity or in humanity as such, but a complex relationship, namely the unity of hypostasis with the duality of natures, and this hypostasis is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Logos. The unity of the hypostasis ensures the unity of life; the duality of natures - its complexity and duality; the union of natures with each other, headed by a single divine hypostasis, establishes a special, new dual unity, which does not exist either in the Divinity or in humanity. For in the Divinity we have the unity of nature with the trinity of hypostases, and each hypostasis completely possesses it, and in humanity we have the unity of nature with a plurality of hypostatic centers, each of which has its personal possession. In the God-manhood of Christ we have two different natures, inseparably united in one hypostasis, but each preserving its own identity. The Chalcedonian dogma seems, first of all, to be an ontological paradox, which apparently destroys all our initial definitions about the relationship between nature and hypostasis. In fact, every spiritual being is an indivisible unity of hypostasis and nature, because they can only exist mutually: hypostasis in nature and nature in hypostasis. Therefore, hypostasis and nature are not at all mutually independent principles, some kind of primary elements of being that can be added and rearranged in different ways and form completely new compounds from them (“en-hypostasis”). They are not flexible at all and do not allow any violence against themselves, which is exposed as ontological absurdity. And if it is indeed impossible to put the head of a dog on a person in order to obtain a cynocephalus, then it is even less possible to make the hypostasis of one creature the hypostasis of another creature (for an imaginary attempt at such an unnatural union, Apollinaris was accused by St. Gregory of Nyssa of inventing minotaurs and tragelaphus.). Hypostasis and nature do not exist separately, but they constitute a single living and living spirit, and this unity of life is their inseparability, and division could mean destruction here. Meanwhile, according to the Chalcedonian definition, the divine hypostasis of the two-natural God-humanity, its, so to speak, subject is simultaneously the subject of both divine and human nature, and both natures are inseparably united in the unity of life of this single hypostasis. The divine hypostasis of the Logos is also human, as a subject and human nature. The latter, as the Fathers of the Church explain, does not remain without hypostasis, just as there cannot be a non-hypostatic natural existence at all, but is hypostasized by the Divine hypostasis. If, indeed, we insist on the concept of “in-hypostasis” for this case, then we need to give it not an abstract, formal-logical definition, regardless of ontological meaning, but show its concrete ontological significance. If we understand by “hypostasis” only the combination of essentially different and vitally incompatible things, then this is a completely empty logical abstraction, resting on the assumption of the ontologically impossible and simply erasing the boundaries of being in a general confusion. However, beyond the limits of its formal application, the idea of ​​hypostasis is meaningless, and therefore it does not give anything for understanding the incarnation with the acceptance of human nature into the Divine hypostasis. The massive Chalcedonian definition of the unity of hypostasis under two natures is a theologically unexplained scheme that still requires dogmatic understanding, and without it it remains like a clanking cymbal, even with the most sincere and zealous desire to contain Orthodox teaching. One can, of course, take refuge in an asylum ignoratiae, declaring the Incarnation an incomprehensible mystery, which, in its essence, of course, it is. However, this mystery receives its dogmatic contours for reason as well, which is confirmed by the very existence of a dogmatic definition. The latter appeals to reason as the norm of true teaching, which must be accepted for understanding, of course, with faith in its truth (for faith never imposes prohibitions on reason in its own field and, on the contrary, condemns lazy obscurantism). In addition, it is now too late to prohibit the understanding of the dogma, after an attempt was made in the doctrine of hypostasis, which not only was not condemned as an inappropriate rationalization of the mystery, but even received the approval of such church authorities as St. John of Damascus. Therefore, the feasible understanding of the Chalcedonian dogma is a pious duty for theology, without which the lazy slave buries the treasure of the dogma in the ground for the sake of imaginary protection. So, what does this “hypostasis” of the Logos mean in human nature? Is it ontologically possible and why is it possible? We pose the question specifically about the ontological possibility arising from the relationship of natures, and thereby exclude the unrequited reference to God's omnipotence, as such, for which everything is generally assumed to be possible. Yes, this possibility of everything exists for the omnipotence of God in creation, for God as the Creator. But after God created the world and endowed it with indestructible existence in his own ontology, God himself established this ontology for himself, and already relates to the world not on the basis of omnipotence, but of providential interaction. The incarnation also belongs to this area. The latter, although in a certain sense is a new creation, even more wonderful and incomprehensible than the first, it is not a creation out of nothing and therefore cannot be understood only as a manifestation of the omnipotence of God. On the contrary, just as in relation to the world God himself posits its existence as a condition and boundary, so in the incarnation God does not abolish his own ontology of the world and, in particular, human nature. Man, for his part, participates in the incarnation of God, as such, he cannot be abolished or destroyed in his naturalness by God's omnipotence - for the sake of the incarnation of God, for the incarnation of God, carried out at such a price, would not be an incarnation at all. In the incarnation of God, human nature is surpassed, but not destroyed. Therefore, the incarnation of God cannot include any act that would not be reconciled with human nature, but would contradict it, would not be ontologically inclusive and possible for man. Man remains himself - this is the first condition of true incarnation, and what is inconceivable for man and impossible for him cannot be included in it. This ontological postulate of the incarnation was recognized in dogma by the fact that it speaks of the union in Christ of a perfect God and a perfect man, i.e. undiminished in its ontological completeness and not destroyed in its humanity. This postulate has both Christological and soteriological evidence. In the first respect, it was impossible to talk about the incarnation of God if the human nature perceived by Him differed significantly from the nature of man created by God; this would mean that the incarnation of God turned out to be impossible and failed (and to allow this would, of course, be the greatest blasphemy and disbelief). In the second respect, the perception of an inhuman person, obviously, would not be saving for a person in his true nature. So, even in the incarnation of God, a person must remain neither diminished nor surpassed, but himself, that is, “perfect” (τέλειος). So, if the human nature of the God-man is “hypostasised” in the Logos, so that the hypostasis of the Logos has become His own hypostasis of His human nature, then this is ontologically possible and pre-established. The question arises: how is this possible, and why could it have been pre-established? Could human nature accept and accommodate, instead of the human hypostasis, or rather, as a human, the hypostasis of the Logos? And how was it possible for the Logos himself to be so lenient? A general answer with reference to the image of God in man is not enough here. It is necessary to show in what exactly the power of the image of God is manifested in “hypostasis,” and what side of it is revealed here? Human nature can live only in the human hypostasis, and it cannot even accept the angelic hypostasis, with all its closeness to man, for the hypostasis of the disembodied spirit cannot accommodate the life of the incarnate spirit, truly accept human “flesh”. From here it is necessary to conclude that the hypostasis of the Logos, since it hypostasizes human nature, in a special sense is also a human hypostasis, characteristic not only of God, but also of Man, that is, the God-man. In order to be a human hypostasis, the hypostasis of the Logos must be human or, more precisely, co-human, which is why its hypostasis of human nature is not violence against the latter, or its destruction, but corresponds to the original relationship between both. On the other hand, a person must be able to accept and accommodate, as a human hypostasis, the Divine hypostasis. In other words, a person, by his original nature, must be in this sense God-human, bear within himself hypostatic God-manhood, and in this capacity be an ontological “place” for the hypostasis of the Logos. Thus, the postulate of incarnation from the side of the hypostasis of the Logos in man is a certain primordial identity existing between the Divine Self of the Logos and the human self, which does not eliminate all the essential differences between them. This is the relationship of the image to the Proto-Image, which simultaneously combines the identity that generally exists between the image and the Proto-Image, with the difference that exists between eternity and temporality, the Creator and creation. The human hypostatic spirit, which lives in man and constitutes his main difference from the animal world, has a divine, uncreated origin from the “breath of God.” He is a spark of the Divine, endowed by God with a created-hypostatic face in the image of the Logos, and in Him the entire Holy Trinity, to the extent and how the trinitarian face can be reflected in created self-consciousness. Through his spirit, man is a participant in the Divine nature and is capable of “deification.” Being united with human nature and living by it, man is not only a man, but also a god-man in purpose, in potency, in his formal structure. At the same time, man in his nature, as the soul of the world, as “flesh,” that is, through his animated body, unites in himself the entire world, which in this sense is his humanity. Man consists of an uncreated divine spirit, hypostasized by a created self, and a created soul and body - a spiritual-physical being. It is his humanity, in its cosmic existence, that has the image of the created Sophia, therefore, he himself contains the created Sophia, which is hypostasized in him, he is thereby the world Sophia’s hypostasis. Of course, the sinful state overshadows his divine homeland in a person’s consciousness, and at the same time deprives him of the fullness of Sophia’s existence, plunging him into captivity to the elements of the world, which appears before him not as Sophia, but only natura (having become itself, give birth to itself), or the spontaneously chaotic Achamoth. But this darkened state of a person is not true for him, in accordance with his own nature. Man needs restoration, which includes salvation from sin. He wants to become the son of God and enter into the glory of creation, for which he is destined. From a natural man, he is called to become a God-man, to outgrow himself into a true God-man - this is his internal postulate. Man carries within himself the coming Christ, and before His coming he himself is not able to become himself, that is, a true man, to realize in himself that new spiritual birth, which is not from flesh and blood, but from God. But not only is man the God-man in his destiny, but the Logos is also the eternal God-man, as the Prototype of created man. The Logos is a demiurgic hypostasis, the face of which is imprinted in the Divine world, as well as in the Divine Sophia, by the self-revelation of the Divine through the Logos. The Hypostasis of the Logos is directly related to Sophia. In this sense, He is Sophia, as the self-revelation of the Divine, her direct hypostasis (although not the only one). Logos is Sophia in the sense that He has Sophia as His own content and life, for Sophia in the Divine is not only a collection of ideal, lifeless images, but an organism of living intelligent essences that in themselves manifest the life of the Divine. Sophia is both heavenly humanity, as the prototype of created things, and, as pre-eternally hypostasized in the Logos, she is His pre-eternal God-manhood. Если мы сопоставим этот ряд положений о небесном Богочеловеке и земном, тварном, то для нас становится понятным и естественным основное учение антропологии ап. Paul is not about one, but about two Adams, not about one, but about two people; “the first man from the earth, earthy; второй человек Господь с неба... И как мы носили образ перстного, так будем носить и образ небесного» ( 1Кор. 15, 47, 49 ). И этому же соответствует антропологический смысл сказанного Господом Никодиму: «никто не восходил на небо, как только сшедший с небес Сын Человеческий, сущий на небесах» ( Ин. 3, 3 ). И это двойство образов Богочеловека, Человека Небесного и тварного, закрепляется в едином образе Человека, в Себе соединяющем и небесное и тварное человечество: «Человек Иисус» ( Рим. 5, 15 ). Therefore, the hypostasis of the Logos, the Heavenly God-Man, could itself become a hypostasis of created man and make him a true God-man, realizing his original God-manhood. The Hypostasis of the Logos is eternally human, and therefore it could become a hypostasis for created humanity, elevating, but not abolishing it. The Logos for the human nature of Christ, one might say, will simply and naturally replace the created hypostasis. But this turned out to be possible because this created hypostasis itself was supernatural, representing the divine principle in man. The uncreated, divine-human hypostasis of Adam in Christ was here replaced by the Divine hypostasis of the Logos. Of course, this has a completely immeasurable significance that, instead of a created, although of divine origin, hypostasis, human nature takes on the hypostasis of the Logos itself. But this does not violate the general structure of man, in which two components are his spiritual-physical nature, created from nothing and therefore in the full sense created, and the hypostatic spirit of divine origin, which was created by God not from nothing, but received life from God’s own life. Human nature is united with the hypostatic spirit, and the hypostatic spirits emanating from God are different and multiple, although they are interconnected in the multi-unity of humanity. The number of these hypostatic spirits includes Himself and the Logos, Who replaced the personal human hypostasis in the humanity of Christ. And human nature in Christ could accept this replacement and bear within itself the Divine Person as its own person. Therefore, we confess Christ as a perfect man, in whom the fully human composition is preserved, for the infusion of the Logos into man has a sufficient ontological basis. The fact that in man there is his human spirit emanating from God, then in Christ there is the Eternal Logos, the Divine Spirit, the Second Hypostasis of the Most Holy One. Trinity. The New Adam Christ, who in his human nature is hypostasized by the Logos, is a perfect man, formally, in his composition, not different from any person, and all His difference is in that special hypostasis that is inherent in Him. The Logos accepts the spiritual-physical nature of man σαρξ, preserving His Divinity, which is inherent in Him in inextricable union with His hypostasis. Due to the fact that the Logos, accepting “flesh”, i.e. human nature, remains as the Divine hypostasis in inseparability with His Divine nature, Christ is one-hypostatic, but two-natural. An analogy with this dual nature in created man can be seen in the fact that man, being a created hypostasis that hypostasizes human nature, by his divine nature, although a created hypostasis, is turned to God and can be involved by grace in the life of the divine nature. This possibility of communion with God, which is a reality in Christ, is also in man the formal potential of two-nature or God-manhood. Therefore, in Christ and from this side, violence is not done to human nature, the inconceivable is not introduced into his life, but in the New Adam the true image of the Old Adam, his destiny, is fulfilled. For man is already a ready-made form for true God-manhood, which he himself is not able to realize, but for which he was created and called. The Incarnation is not a catastrophe for human nature, or violence against it, but, on the contrary, its fulfillment. Therefore Christ, being perfect God, is also true man. One age-old misunderstanding needs to be cleared up here. Isn’t the teaching we are developing Apollinarianism, a ghost which both ancient and modern theologians alike deny, from St. Kirill to modern kenotics? However, this fear is enormously exaggerated, both because the developed teaching in its initial motives and conclusions differs significantly from Apollinarianism (and precisely in that it is rejected by the church as a heresy), and because a certain similarity with Apollinarianism is by no means a Christological defect. As we tried to show, none of the church writers can compare with Apollinaris in the sharpness of understanding of the Christological problem, and no one theologically approached the Chalcedonian definition, anticipating it, like the same Apostle, who remained not understood in his time, and he himself falsely understood his own constructions. Ap. with body and soul, and by soul they meant, of course, not only the soul in the proper sense, as the life principle of ψυχή, but also the spirit. Thus, Apollinaris was opposed, as an Orthodox Christian, by the doctrine that in Christ there is a complete man of body and soul (or, as this idea should be more accurately expressed, body, soul and spirit), and, moreover, a hypostatic Logos with a divine nature. The imaginary Orthodoxy of anti-Apollinarianism thus understood is pure “Nestorianism,” because it affirms in Christ two souls (or spirits), and, consequently, two hypostases with two natures. With such a correlation, how one should understand their relationship and connection, and, in particular, how “in-hypostasis” can be combined with this, i.e., the adoption of human without hypostatic flesh into the hypostasis of the Logos, remains completely inexplicable. Dogmatic condemnation of false opinions by Ap. (moreover, hasty, undifferentiated and unexplained) imposed a premature taboo on his theology. The latter, more than the teachings that fought against it, corresponds to the Chalcedonian dogma, which affirms the unity of hypostasis in the duality of natures, and human nature is defined at the IV, V, VI Councils precisely as inspired flesh, that is, according to Apollinaris. And it is unnecessary to diminish the real power of this definition by the fact that Apollinaris supposedly had in mind only the lower animal soul. What kind of soul does the conciliar definition of ψυχήνοερά mean (which, by the way, is the literal expression of the Apostle himself, which he himself always used in presenting his doctrine of the incarnation), this has never been explained and, of course, there is least of all reason to put a Nestorian meaning into it, that is, to accept, along with the soul, a special hypostatic spirit for human nature. The conciliar definition, which does not take any definite position in relation to dicho- or trichotomy, of course, understands the same thing that Ap. understood, that is, not the hypostatic spirit, for the one and only hypostasis here is the Logos, but the soul that animates the body. And, of course, there is no need and even no reason to understand this soul only as a lower animal principle. In general, “soul” in the Bible is used both in relation to animals of every kind (Gen. 1:20, 24), and in relation to man (Gen. 2:7), and there are few expressions in the Bible more diverse, replete with shades of meaning than soul. The main difference is that sometimes soul is used in the sense of the vital, living principle in every living creature, including man, in other cases it is used to designate the spirit in man and, of course, in the God-man, but in other cases it differs from the spirit and is directly opposed to it: (1 Thess. 5:23; I Pet. 1:22). But to understand the soul as a synonym for spirit in the text of the conciliar definitions is completely impossible because the spirit is hypostatic, for there cannot be a spirit without or extra-hypostasis, and yet the only hypostasis of the God-man is the Logos, and human nature in Christ does not have a special hypostasis. The soul in a person is the fullness of his natural cosmic life, which includes the highest abilities of man as a natural being, and human souls themselves differ in their individual structure. In the structure of man, the soul belongs to the mediation between the body and the spirit, it tends to be the organ of the spirit in the body and in the entire natural world, and some souls can deliberately open up for this, others, on the contrary, resist this (and the apostle speaks about this very case: “this is earthly spiritual wisdom” James 3:15; “they are natural people who do not have a spirit” Jude 19; “a natural man does not receive the Spirit of God” 1 Cor. 2:4). Such a “spiritual” soul in a person is animal, it brings him closer to the animal world, but at the same time, it is called upon to elevate him above it. She is capable of receiving spirit, because she was created for spiritualization. And in this sense, it is clear that soul and spirit are often used as synonymous expressions: the spirit of a person lives in the soul, acts in him through the soul. Nevertheless, there remains a fundamental difference between spirit and soul, as between the supernatural, uncreated, and the natural, created, principle. And when it is said about Christ that He received inspired flesh from His Mother, then, of course, it goes without saying that He received from her all created human nature. The soul living in the body, or animate corporeality, is natural humanity. However, it, as a non-spiritual, non-hypostasis and non-hypostatic principle, needs hypostasis and hypostasis, which are given to man by his spirit. But the spirit in man, although human in the sense of being destined for incarnation (as opposed to angelic), is in him a supernatural principle, even a supercreated one, which comes from above and inhabits man. This supernatural beginning of the hypostatic spirit in Christ was the Logos, which received from man the natural nature σὰρξ flesh, and, thus, Christ was a “perfect” man, as the Church teaches about this. So, the perfection of human nature in Christ is not determined by the fact that in Christ there existed a specific human personality, Jesus, to which was added, moreover, the hypostatic Logos (which is Nestorianism) or its power (the teaching of Paul of Samosata, 288 Ebionites, Socinians and modern rationalists), so that the being of the God-man would differ from a simple man in greater complexity and a greater number of elements. The God-man differed from every individual person in that in Him, out of three elements: the hypostatic Spirit, soul, flesh, the first element was not a created hypostasis, although of divine origin, but the hypostasis of the Logos itself. But formally, the trinity: Logos, soul, flesh, is a special case of the general human trinity: spirit, soul, flesh. But the Logos, due to His inseparability with the Divinity, carries with Him His divine nature, and in this, indeed, the God-man Christ differs in greater complexity from man. This complexity lies precisely in the duality of natures in Christ. His hypostatic divine Spirit, the Logos, which hypostasizes human nature and imparts to it the fullness of human life, also has within itself its own divine life, “indivisible and unmerged, immutable and not perverse.” This is the formula of the Council of Chalcedon. The basis of the incarnation must be sought not only in relation to the Hypostatic principles in the Logos and man, but also in relation to the divine and human natures. It is clear that the Logos could not have become a human hypostasis, hypostasized human nature, if He had not been in some sense co-human with us, if the eternal image of humanity had not been imprinted in His own life. And, on the contrary, human nature could not bear within itself the hypostasis of the Logos, be hypostasized in Him, if it itself were not imprinted by Him, if it did not conceal His own image. This ontologically reveals the relationship between the divine and the human: humana natura capax divini. Therefore, the world for the Logos was His own (ἴδιος), and when He came into the world, “he came to His own (although “His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11). It is this property of the world and in it of human nature for the Logos that constitutes the natural basis of the incarnation of God: not only man’s co-hypostasis with the hypostatic God, but also his co-nature with Him (although not co-nature), which is evidenced in the Logos’s acceptance of flesh: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1, 14). One last question remains. The hypostasis of the God-man is the Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, carrying within Himself His Divine nature. From the general teaching about the Holy Trinity we know that God is a trinitarian hypostasis. The Divine Subject in Himself has three hypostatic centers, which coexist in it, without violating, but revealing the originality of the hypostatic Subject and its uniqueness. All these three centers in the Holy Trinity are equally real and, so to speak, equally subjective, each of them is a separate equally divine Self, and yet all three of them are the one Divine Self in Its absoluteness - the Trinity is consubstantial and indivisible. As far as we talk about the life of the Holy Trinity in itself (“immanent”, as is commonly expressed in Western theology), no difficulties arise regarding the unity of the Divine Subject and the trinity of hypostatic centers. A balance is maintained between them, so that unity exists in the unity of the three, and the three are identified in one. Trinity is a special absolute relationship that exists in the Holy. The Trinity, its sacred number, the trinity, is simultaneously 3 and 1, a number that does not exist in human arithmetic, which is based on the rational distinction of individual one way or another similar things and their juxtaposition and juxtaposition, i.e. counting. In this sense, the Divine Trinumber is not even a number, but a supernumber, obtained both from the rational operation of counting, but from the rational comprehension of the absolute relation, which is the Holy Trinity, and which does not fit into arithmetic definitions at all. However, the situation is not so simple when determining the relationship of the Holy Trinity to the world (the so-called “economic” Trinity, as opposed to the “immanent”), which differentiates the Holy Trinity in its own way and introduces into it a new, if not division, then distinction. We know that in accordance with the personal properties of individual hypostases and their relationships, the nature of the participation of each of the hypostases in creation and the life of the world is determined: the Father is the creator, the Son is the image of creation, the Holy Spirit is the life of creation, the giver of life. Creation, as something becoming, exists in time and thus, as we have already seen, it involves the existence of God in time and, in particular, differentiates the action of different hypostases not only according to their hypostatic character, but also in a certain sequence. The Most Holy Trinity with its pre-eternal τάξις (order of hypostases) exists super-temporally, and taxis in this sense is only a definite, concrete relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Creation, involving the existence of God in temporality, determines taxis in its own way, differentiating the relationship of hypostases and temporal sequence. In the relation of God to the world, there are single, cumulative acts of the entire Holy Trinity, determined by the specific hypostatic action of all three hypostases: such, for example, is the creation of the world and man by the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. But such is not the providence of God over the world, which God carries out not only trinitarian, but also in separate hypostatic acts, by the action of individual hypostases. In particular, the Logos is a hypostasis that acts and reveals itself in the Old Testament as God. At the beginning He comes to paradise for a conversation with the primordial couple and pronounces a sentence on the fallen ancestors, and He, throughout the entire Old Testament, reveals himself to him as Jehovah, Adonai, Sabaoth, etc., appears to man in various theophanies and doxophany, except for the cases of theophany, especially imprinted with the image of the trinity: Gen. 18, Ex. 6 Dan. 7. Likewise, the Holy Spirit. acts and is revealed in the Old Testament as a giver of grace-filled gifts for various ministries (royal, elder, high priest, prophetic, military, architectural and artistic, etc.). Thus, the “immanent” Trinity in Its relation to the world receives the face of the “economic” Trinity. What is the ontological relationship between the two, and how should this difference be understood? This question is not usually raised in such a general form either in cosmology or in Christology, except in special special cases. Of course, here, first of all, any change in the Holy Trinity caused by the difference and, so to speak, transition from the immanent to the economic Trinity must be considered dogmatically excluded. The Most Holy Trinity is one and self-identical, and this difference arises from the life of the creature and its relationship to the Divine, precisely to the image in which it contains the revelation of the Divine. The creation fragments and multiplies this single revelation, and from here comes the difference in the way in which individual hypostases participate in its life. However, it is eternity that is the true basis for revelation in time. It is necessary to postulate a direct connection between the immanent Trinity and the actions and revelations of individual hypostases in the economic Trinity. Each hypostasis, as a specifically qualified subject, acts in accordance with its immanent hypostatic properties. We are not the two of us here at the Holy Trinity; but we distinguish what She herself wanted to distinguish in Herself and therefore bifurcate: life in Herself and life in creation and with creation - God as the Absolute and as the Creator. Ontologically, for the Holy Trinity itself, this distinction or bifurcation does not introduce anything new, for temporality in its positive content is adequate to eternity and ultimately merges with it. In God the “Alpha and Omega”, the First and the Last, the beginning and the end are identical. But, looking from the world, for the world, we perceive the revelation of the Divine as a new reality opening up for us in time and at every point of its existence, which is in the making, is being accomplished and has not yet been completed. In other words, from the point of view of the world in St. The “economic” trinity reflects the world process with its achievements. Eternity is identical with temporality, immobility with becoming, the economic Trinity with the immanent Trinity. This general attitude of God to the world in the economic Trinity is accompanied by a special separation from its unity of individual hypostases that manifest their hypostatic impact on the world. The hypostases themselves in their being remain invariably in the bosom of the eternal relationship of trinitarian intra-hypostatic love, but in action, in the world, they differ and, as it were, are mutually isolated, for these actions, different due to their hypostatic properties, are manifested and differentiated for the world in its world time, entering the history of the world. There is, of course, not a trace of tritheism here, but there is, undoubtedly, not only a triune, but also a threefold, separately hypostatic revelation of God to the world. The divine hypostases are effectively, in relation to the world, not only united in we (“let us create man in our image”), but also, as it were, separated, so that what the Father does, neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit does, and each hypostasis has its own special way of acting in the world. Therefore, the economic Trinity is not only “separately personal,” but also separately effective. On the basis of general considerations, a particular question of Christology is also resolved: how could one hypostasis of the Holy Trinity be incarnated and thus stand out from its trinity? Doesn’t this introduce in a hidden image the actual separation of hypostases, tritheism, polytheism? And if not, then how is it possible for only one hypostasis to be incarnated without the other two, with which it is in inseparable unity, also incarnating? And from here further questions arise: how does the triple divine life proceed at a time when one of the hypostases is absent from heaven (in the “descent from heaven”), but is embodied on earth? How is it possible for her to participate in the one and consubstantial life of the Holy Trinity, after she has left its unity? And even further: how is it possible for the Second Hypostasis, bearing human flesh, to ascend to heaven, unlike other hypostases? Etc., etc. All these questions are resolved from the general principle of God’s relationship to the world. God reveals himself to the world, as the Creator and Provider, on the one hand, as consubstantial and indivisible, manifesting His “properties” in the world, and on the other, as three divine hypostases, each of the hypostases opening and acting in the world in its own way. The Incarnation is a special way of relating to the world and acting in it, characteristic specifically of the Second Hypostasis. Along the path of His general relationship to the world lies the incarnation of God, and this incarnation of the Second Hypostasis has its basis in the eternal sonship of the Word. The Incarnation cannot be understood in the sense that, having been decided in the Divine Council, it could be the work of any other hypostasis other than the Second, because for Her it follows precisely from a personal property, sonship, both in relation to the world and in relation to God. The face of the Logos is imprinted on the world, who in the fullness of time descends from heaven into the world to become human in it. 289 However, the inseparability of the Holy Trinity in the matter of incarnation is manifested in the fact that it is accomplished with the participation of the entire Holy Trinity, and each of its persons, according to His personal property: the Father sends, and not only the Son, but also the Holy Spirit, descending into the world on the Virgin Mary, on Jesus, on the apostles; The Son becomes incarnate, and the Holy Spirit accomplishes the work of incarnation. This does not detract from the personal incarnation of the Logos, but His work on earth cannot in any way be separated from the life of the entire Holy Trinity. Christianity is the religion of Christ, God incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, but precisely because of this it is also faith in the Holy Trinity, consubstantial and indivisible. 4. Two natures in Christ: divine Sophia and created Sophia The Incarnation is not only the acceptance of human nature by the hypostasis of the Logos, which thereby becomes a human hypostasis, but also the union of two natures, the Divine, as inseparable from the hypostasis of the Logos, and the created-human. How should we ontologically understand this connection? We already know from the history of dogma that this connection should not be considered as their identification or the abolition of their very difference, that is, in a monophysit way. Neither the divine nature dissolves nor abolishes the human, which would abolish their very union in their difference, nor can the human, of course, abolish the divine. If the first idea was a great temptation not only for the militant Monophysites, but in fact also for the Orthodox (suffice it to recall the always wavering point of view of St. Cyril and his followers), then the second could not find supporters due to its obvious incongruity, or it already led beyond the boundaries of Christianity, as with the Ebionites ancient and modern. At the same time, this union does not tolerate the derogation that takes place in any “Nestorianism” (or Adoptianism), where instead of a union, the coexistence or a certain juxtaposition of two separate natures is actually established. Finally, the union of two natures cannot be understood as their mixture, a kind of chemical combination, so that the result is a certain new nature, neither divine nor human. 290 This is “Apollinarianism” in a stylized way. The dogmatic efforts of the era of the ecumenical councils were aimed at maintaining balance in the relationship of both natures with the elimination of biases towards any one of them, or their separation. The divine wisdom that guided these efforts kept the balance undisturbed, and it was this, the beginning of the balance of the two natures in their originality and originality, that was proclaimed as the main dogmatic definition of Chalcis. cathedral This principle of balance is naturally expressed only in negative definitions that block deviations on both sides: indivisible, unmerged, unchangeable, inseparable. For this purpose, negative definitions are quite adequate. However, it is just as natural if one feels a certain dissatisfaction with these only negative definitions, which, as is known from logic, cannot provide meaningful, positive knowledge (the so-called “infinite” judgment in logic). Of course, the historical commentary also makes the concrete, positive, and not just the negative meaning of this definition intelligible, because with negations here a certain type of Christological judgment is eliminated and receives a negative assessment. However, since these negations are directed precisely in opposite directions, it is logically impossible and dogmatically difficult to derive a positive definition from these opposite negations. However, these oppositely directed negations 291 do not constitute a logical contradiction that would exclude their compatibility and thereby lead the judgment itself to absurdity. Negations directed in opposite directions in the definition of the Council of Chalcedon mean not so much contradictory, like yes and no, judgments, but different, albeit of opposite directions. They still allow some kind of middle or third, synthetic, judgment, although it is not expressed in the definition. In fact, “inseparably and unmerged” equally eliminates both complete separation and complete fusion. However, they still leave room for differentiation, or separateness of being (otherwise there would be no place for union), as well as for the union directly proclaimed in dogma. Thus, extracting positive content from the negative definitions given in Chalcis. dogma, we come to the conclusion that here, with the elimination of the complete fusion of natures, their union is proclaimed, that is, a certain image of fusion or identification, although with complete preservation of differences; when complete separation is eliminated, a certain image of separateness remains, albeit with essential inseparability. In a word, here a certain image of union with non-fusion and differentiation with inseparability is sought and proclaimed, which, nevertheless, is free from inclination in one direction or the other. However, the dogma is silent about the very positive relationship between the two natures. What does this silence mean? Should it be dogmatically interpreted as a refusal to understand, or a prohibition of definition? or to understand only historically, as its actual absence? There is no doubt for us that the answer to this question can only be given in the second sense, only of actual absence. Firstly, the history of the cathedral speaks for this, and the entire set of circumstances under which this determination was made. One can even find in them an element of historical chance, for, although the Spirit of God acts regardless of the combination of random causes, one cannot close one’s eyes to these latter. Secondly, the unfinished definition of the IV Council was actually continued and completed by the definition of the VI Council. Council on two wills and energies, from which it follows that the question itself was by no means dogmatically closed.” And thirdly, and this is the most important thing, this issue continued to be subject to dogmatic discussion all the time, and, in essence, it was the only thing discussed. And the negative formula of Chalcis. Council cannot therefore be understood as a prohibition of positive definitions, but precisely only as a preliminary definition, incomplete, non-exhaustive, awaiting continuation. The removal of the question of the positive relationship between the two natures into the reserve of apophatic (negative theology) therefore has no basis. In the dogma of the Incarnation, we indeed stop before what is inaccessible to created comprehension, but this is permissible only after everything accessible to it has been comprehended. So, we are faced with a dogmatic question about the positive and relationship of the two natures in Christ. Christ perceived human nature not by the arbitrariness of abstract omnipotence, which does not take into account the nature of things, but in accordance with the latter, because it was human nature that was suitable for such perception, ontologically capable of containing it. And the Logos became a hypostasis for this nature, again not due to the same abstract omnipotence, but because it is human nature that is called upon to be hypostasized as the hypostasis of the Logos. And He could become a human hypostasis, for human nature itself had a calling and destiny to unite with the Logos. The Logos is initially in a positive relationship with human nature, just as human nature in its depths bears His image and awaits His descent into the world. Therefore, the fact that “the Logos became flesh,” that is, took on human nature, was not, so to speak, an ontological surprise, but, on the contrary, was the fulfillment of the destiny inscribed in heaven and on earth. But, becoming a human hypostasis, the Logos not only hypostatically united human nature with Himself, but also united with it naturally, bringing with Him into this union also His own divine life or divine nature. By uniting His own nature with human nature, the Logos, like Christ, combines both of these natures in His life. These two natures must therefore be understood not only in their inseparability and non-fusion, intransibility and immutability, in a word, in their originality, but we must with the same force affirm their union, which is realized - neither more nor less - in the unity of the life of the God-man, by virtue of the unity of its hypostatic center. Christ is one, and, being in two natures, lives one life, which is evidence of the very possibility of their union. Both natures, included in the single life of a single hypostasis - so to speak, without a split personality - must be somehow akin to each other, capable of that vital identification. In both natures, Divine and human, uncreated and created, there must be something intermediate or common, which can be isolated from brackets and revealed as an immutable basis for such a connection. This common principle is the sophia of both the Divine world, i.e., the Divine nature of Christ, and the created world, i.e., His human nature. The created world was created on the basis of the prototypes of the Divine world, like the created image of the Divine Sophia in its formation, but this Divine Sophia itself is the Divine nature of the Logos. T. oh, in their basis and content, the Heavenly Sophia and the earthly, created-human Sophia are identified, differing only in the way of their existence: what is in heaven is the real Majesty, and Glory, and Wisdom, and the Beauty of the images of Divine self-revelation, then in the created world, on earth, is in formation, in the process, like the eternal seeds of created existence, immersed in non-existence, and growing on the basis of created freedom. The Logos pre-eternally reveals the Father as the Word of all words, i.e., all divine ideas and images in their unity, and He determines by the will of the Father this All to created being - “all that was and without Him nothing would have come into being,” i.e. He, as it were, repeats His created being. Therefore, it is completely natural and inevitable both the relation of identity between the Divine Sophia and the created, and the whole difference between the eternal, uncreated being, and the created, becoming, and, although not yet becoming itself, but having to become, in order to then be identified with its Prototype, to achieve the fullness of its sophisification or deification. From this it becomes clear that the Logos could take on human nature without ontological contradiction with His own. The obstacle here would not consist in the incompatibility of natures, but only in the difference between the two images of natural being. The Logos, having the Divine Sophia as His nature, through the incarnation of God enters into the process of her created formation and thereby diminishes in the fullness of His own existence. Essentially, the incarnation of God, considered as the descent of God’s eternity into becoming in time, is identical with the creation of the world by God, as the emergence of the Divine outside of Himself, into the extra-divine region of created becoming. The only difference here is that in the creation of the world the latter remains outside of God, only as an object of his saving influence, and in the incarnation of God, God accepts created formation into His own life and himself becomes its Subject, while preserving all the eternal fullness of His own natural-sophia nature. This is what the dogma means about the presence of two natures in one hypostasis. The Eternal God becomes the becoming God, accepts into Himself and for Himself, into His own life, the becoming of the world and, above all, introduces times and seasons into His life. The Logos becomes Jesus, born, living and dying in a specific place and time. This antithesis: eternity and time, the fullness of being and becoming, is the ultimate concept against which human thought rests in its desire to comprehend the mystery of the incarnation. It, indeed, remains a mystery for human comprehension, since here the immutability of eternity, inaccessible to man, is combined with the only knowledgeable temporal formation. This is a mystery because such a connection in itself exceeds a person’s own measure and to that extent remains ontologically transcendent for him. However, it is also a source of revelation for him, since it is addressed to the person himself and his life. For even man, at the bottom of his temporality, under the cover of becoming, knows eternity and comes into contact with it. Therefore, he himself, having a homeland in heaven, and not only on earth, has in himself the image of dual nature, revealing in his created nature the uncreated Sophia. This is the very basis of his being, which is revealed to natural man in mystical and philosophical contemplation (as evidenced by the prophetic mystics and philosophers of all times). The true revelation about the compatibility of eternity and formation, divine and created in man, is given by the church. Life in Christ, when “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” and the grace-filled illumination of the Spirit from which man is born spiritually, in general deification, which begins in the militant Church, gives man the experience of his own dual nature, the combination of divine eternity and created formation. But, of course, an immeasurable difference exists between created man, who knows the divine principle only as a gift and givenness, and the God-man, who has this divine life as His own nature, and human formation as a matter of saving love and self-abasement. What in man is always ascent, in the God-man there is only divine condescension. Therefore, the union of both natures in Christ is not just an abstract dogmatic scheme, but is a vital truth, contained by us along the paths of our own religious experience. Thus, the understood dogma about the duality of natures in Christ during their vital unity in a single hypostasis of the Logos is revealed to us from the side of four negative definitions. Their general meaning boils down to establishing the inseparability and non-fusion of both natures, as the uncreated and created principles. They are inseparable in the unity of the life of Christ, for they are not different, but identical in content, as a noumenon and a phenomenon, as a basis and a consequence, as a principle and its revelation. This inseparability is not external and arbitrarily given, but an immanent, internally motivated norm of the relationship between the Divine and created Sophia, united in the unity of life of the incarnate Logos. But the norm of non-fusion is just as immanent and internally motivated, for how can time and eternity, immutability and becoming be merged, i.e. mixed or mechanically combined? Therefore, they have their own norm of relationship, which equally does not allow their combination on the same ontological plane, nor their mixing or alternation. Another thought, contained in 4 negative definitions, is also added here, namely about the immutability of natures. This is only another expression of non-fusion, for with improper fusion, a change in nature can result. Immutability is already contained in non-fusion, and the union of two natures, by virtue of which the Logos became Christ, is neither a change nor a fusion of them. But at the same time, one cannot help but see that there is no equivalence between the two natures being united, for one of them is uncreated, the other is created, and this difference is reflected in the nature of their relationship. Although they are inseparable, they are not equal. The primacy of the divine nature, except for its uncreatedness; It also manifests itself in the fact that the hypostasis of the Logos belongs to her. In the dogma of the VI Ecumenical Council on the two wills, this inequality of natures is noted in the relationship between the two wills by the fact that the human will, with all its originality, “follows” the divine (the lower). The Logos's acceptance of human nature is associated with its sophia. She is the tertium comparationis, in which the image and the Prototype are identified. However, we know that the sophic nature of human nature, ontologically indestructible, was violated in its existence by the force of original sin, and the world, being sophien at its foundation, became a-sophien, and partly anti-sophien in the image of its existence. Therefore, can the “fallen Sophia,” which is human nature in sin, be accepted into the hypostasis of the Logos? Is she worthy of uniting with the Divine nature in its sophia completeness and purity? Has she lost her dignity and the opportunities associated with it? The preparation of the human race to accept the incarnation of God was accomplished in the Old Testament church by the providential guidance of God. It culminated in the appearance of the New Eve, the Most Pure Virgin Mary, in whom the effect of original sin was weakened. The Most Pure One appeared worthy to become the companion of the Holy Spirit and the Matter of the Lord. This fact must also be understood from the point of view of the sophiological teaching about two natures in Christ. The Virgin Mary appeared as an appropriate and worthy instrument of the incarnation of God because in her the ultimate transformation of human nature was realized, which culminated in the Most Holy. The Mother of God through the descent of the Holy Spirit on Her at the Annunciation and at Pentecost, and then, after her death, through her resurrection and ascension into heaven. Through this She became superior to Adam and Eve in their state before the Fall, for She overcame the temptation of disobedience, which they did not overcome: “behold the handmaid of the Lord.” As the Mother of the Lord, She fully revealed in herself the image of created Sophia. She is precisely that human nature that was worthy of uniting with the Divine nature of the Logos through the acceptance of His hypostasis. In this sense, She is truly the Mother of God. Christ could take on human nature only through birth. But human nature does not exist outside of hypostasis. Therefore, the New Adam could come into the world only through the New One. The incomprehensible blindness and insensibility characteristic of Protestantism in relation to the Most Holy One. Mother of God, they prevent him from seeing this personal participation of the Virgin Mary in the Incarnation. He sees here only a natural act of birth, without lasting meaning and forever lasting consequences, both for the Mother and for the One Born of Her. He does not understand that Christology must necessarily include Mariology, as an inseparable part of it, for Christ, as the Son of Man, is the Son of Mary. Mary is His hypostatic humanity, that “second” nature that He assumed during the incarnation. Incarnation in this sense is not only a two-natural union in one hypostasis, but also a two-hypostasis union in one nature. Christ did not bring his human nature from heaven and did not create anew from the earth, but took it from “the most pure flesh and blood of the Virgin Mary.” And this “taking” is not an external mechanical borrowing or violence of divine omnipotence, but a mutually hypostatic act: the Logos could only take flesh from the Virgin Mary because She gave it, herself desiring to become created Sophia, the Sophian Matter of Christ’s humanity, which should be characterized by the fullness of sophia. What was lacking for this even in the humanity of the Virgin Mary, for She also had in Herself the burden of original sin, was filled by the Holy Spirit, who descended on Her at the Annunciation. This descent of the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, was determined by Her spiritual openness to Him and, so to speak, Sophia’s maturity, on the other hand, it completed this Sophia of hers, so that the ontological postulate became reality. The Incarnation, if we take it in all the breadth and power of this event, cannot be confined to the birth of Christ, the incarnate Logos, alone, but it necessarily includes - no longer the incarnation - but the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Virgin Mary. Christ incarnate and Mary, His hypostatic humanity, overshadowed by the Spirit of the Holy Virgin Theotokos, only in their dual unity give a complete image of the incarnation. Human nature, perceived by the Logos, exists not only in Him, as in Him alone His divine nature exists, but also outside of Him, as the hypostatic humanity of Mary. His human nature must somehow merge or become identified with this hypostatic humanity, otherwise it will not be our true humanity. The created Sophia, like the human nature of Christ, has to be hypostasized not only in the Logos, elevated to participation in the Divine life, but also hypostasized into its own and, therefore, created hypostasis. Therefore, the two natures in the single hypostasis of Christ correspond to two hypostases, hypostasizing His human nature, i.e. along with the hypostasis of the Logos and the own, created, hypostasis of the created Sophia, namely the Virgin Mary. Therefore, the real Mother of God participates in the incarnation of God not only through Her flesh, which would be a natural, instinctive, unfree and uncreative act, one might even say blind (in fact, this is exactly the attitude towards this act in Protestantism), but also through Her hypostasis, spiritually, consciously, inspiredly, sacrificially. This was a new birth from the Wife, which, being, as a seedless conception, free from the flesh of the husband, corresponded to the original, divinely established norm of spiritual conception and birth for the virgin spouses of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Sophia's humanity in the person of the Virgin Mary gave human nature to the Logos, and this birth was her personal, spiritual-physical work, for which the power was given by the Holy Spirit, who eternally rested on the Logos, and in His temporary birth overshadowed the Mother of God and brought Him in Himself, along with Himself. The Birth of God is therefore a spiritual meeting with the Logos of the hypostatic created Sophia, who thereby reveals herself as the Soul of the world, the Queen of all creation, heaven and earth. This dignity is not only a reward given for her merits, it is a revelation of what is immanently contained in the seedless conception of the Son, overshadowed by the Spirit. Even if the full power of what had happened did not immediately become clear to the Virgin Mary herself, for, like created Sophia, She too was subject to temporality and formation, but in the glorification of the Holy One. The Mother of God revealed what was already contained in the birth of God. As the one who gave the Logos human nature, the Virgin Mary is His Most Pure Mother, the Blessed Mother of God. As having received Him into the perfect unity of life in the self-denying love of the “servant of the Lord,” She is the Bride of the Logos or His Wife, having prepared Herself for marriage (Apoc. 19, 7, 21, 9). As the bearer of created human nature in its integrity, restored by the Holy Spirit, She is the personal personification of the Church, and She is the Queen of Heaven, who can no longer remain on earth after Her Son has ascended to heaven, and She herself is also ascended there by Him. 292 Thus, and this is the most important thing, the Incarnation of Christ is carried out not in one Person, but in two: in Christ and the Virgin Mary, which is why the icon of the Mother of God with the Child is the true icon of the Incarnation (and therefore of God-manhood). This duality corresponds not only to the duality of natures in Christ in their unity, but also to the duality of the hypostases of these natures in their separateness. Moreover, human nature, being hypostasized in the Logos, must have its fullness and originality previously realized in its own hypostasis, in the Virgin Mary. Thus, Christ has His humanity in two ways: in Himself, included in His own hypostasis, and outside of Himself, hypostasized in the female hypostasis of Mary (for His humanity is not only flesh in the physical sense, but in the fullness of its spiritual-soul-physical being, living humanity). Connected with this is the revelation about the participation in the incarnation of God not only of the Second Hypostasis, which incarnates, but also of the Third, which embodies: the image of the Logos is a male Infant, growing into the image of a perfect Husband; The image of the Spirit-Bearer is the Virgin Mother, who carries within Herself that which is born of Her. This side of the dogma was not expressed directly in the Chalcedonian definition, which by no means claimed to be exhaustive, but it is already contained in the glorification of the “Virgin Mother of God” for the third century. cathedral, as in all church veneration of the Mother of God, which has not yet been fully revealed and realized dogmatically. Christ, as the incarnate Logos, who has a Divine nature - Sophia, and who himself reveals its ideal content, in His earthly incarnation reveals the hypostatic image of the Heavenly Sophia. And in this sense, He is referred to by the Apostle as “God’s power and God’s Wisdom” (I Cor. 1:24). But precisely as the hypostatic Sophia, He unites in the unity of His two natures the Divine Sophia, as His Divinity, and the created Sophia, as His humanity, and therefore can be called the Wisdom of God in a double quality, as the hypostasis of the Heavenly Sophia and the created Sophia. But created Sophia, which He hypostasizes in His humanity, is also hypostasized in its originality, and this created hypostasis of created Sophia is the Virgin Mary. Therefore, there is not the slightest contradiction in simultaneously calling both Christ and the Mother of God Sophia, although in a different sense. But in the Mother of God, as the Spirit-Bearer, we also honor the hypostatic revelation (although not the incarnation) of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, confessing that the Mother of God is the created Sophia, we thereby testify that the Holy Spirit. there is the hypostatic Wisdom of God, along with the Son, although differently from Him. In connection with the question of the Mother of God, as the bearer of created sophia, the controversial question of the human individuality of the Lord is also resolved. The Lord, having entered the world with its temporality and spatiality and accepted human nature, subject to history, thereby assimilated an empirical image and became a historical individual. He was born at a certain time, in a certain place and from certain parents, belonged to a certain people with its culture, spoke a certain language, etc., etc. In a word, He was a historical individual, and in relation to any empirical definition the principle applies: omnis definitio est negatio, i.e. limitation. If Christ was a Jew according to the flesh, then it means that He was not Greek, Roman, Slavic, etc., and if He spoke Aramaic, then it means that He did not speak other languages ​​(perhaps even Greek, in which His verbs were imprinted on us). But this empirical individuality is only, so to speak, a mask of history, without which there is no possibility of entering the empirical world, or a formal empirical passport. In reality, the individuality of Christ knows no ontological limitations for itself. He was not just a man, like one of many people, or each of them, but He was a Man, like an All-man, and His Personality contained all human images, was an All-person. There is nothing local, limited, or private about Him. His empirical shell is completely transparent and inconspicuous; He is equally close and accessible to everyone who peers at Him. In Christ Jesus there truly is no Greek and Scythian, slave and free, even man and woman, for He is an image for each and every one, speaking directly to the mind and heart, penetrating into the innermost. This is the basis of the universality of the Gospel, its highest pan-humanity. In the face of Christ, every person who approaches him will see himself as he should be, as God wants him, and there is no one who would be closer to us than him, if only in our lives we meet Christ, Who is the Neighbor for every person. The testimony of religious experience says that in Christ, indeed, before us is a “perfect” man (“he is Man”), with all the fullness of humanity and without any individual limitations, to whom nothing human except sin is alien, and therefore every man whose true being is contained in His humanity is not alien. Dogmatically, this is expressed in such a way that Christ accepted all human nature without any limitation, and this idea should be expanded in the sense that in human nature Christ accepted all cosmic existence, since man is a contracted world, a microcosm. He appeared as the new, “last” Adam (1 Cor. 15:45). The progenitor before the Fall, although he was a specific person, a specific self, he carried within himself the fullness of humanity, was an all-man, in fact the entire human race lived in him with all its possible faces. In this sense, Adam, being a person, did not have individuality in the negative, limiting sense of the word, as the fruit of a disintegrated unity that became a bad plurality of egocentrism. Our fallen humanity knows personality as an individual. Otherwise, we don’t even know individuality; we are proud of it, as the only image of personality available to us. But it was not so from the beginning, in Sophia’s image of man. The personality here had to be transparent to another personality: everything is in everyone, and everyone is in everyone, such is the ontology of personality. In Adam, along with the Fall, the image of all humanity was eclipsed; he became only an individuality, which could also give birth only to individualities. And the first of those born by Adam was Cain, in whom egocentrism was manifested in all its strength, to the point of fratricide. Cain was the first individualist with his offspring Cainites. Such individuality is associated with the Fall, with the loss of Sophia’s image by humanity. But in the New Adam this image of Sophia’s humanity is realized, bad individuality is overcome (“I do not My own will, but that of the Father who sent Me,” “whoever wants to follow Me must deny himself,” these are the beginnings of a new life in Christ). Christ, empirically being one of many in historical humanity, in reality contains all of it in Himself in His humanity. What is revealed in chronological sequence in history is united in Him in metaphysical unity - all of humanity without any limitation: past, present and future. All human nature is integrated metaphysically in His nature, and all human faces called into existence find themselves in their authenticity in the face of Christ. This metaphysical fact, this ontological relationship remains transcendent for the sinful, fragmented state of man; it is only a religious postulate. However, this meta-empirical fact is realized for us in empirical reality, and this postulate is nothing other than the Church, the Body of Christ, in which is all things and Christ in all (Col. 3:11). In order to redeem all human nature and transform the entire human race, having clothed it in Christ in His body, the Lord had to take on human flesh, although Adam’s, but not from the fallen Adam, but otherwise, in “the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7). Christ perceived human nature not as every person has it, in a limited, shortened, personal way, in a word, individually, or atomistically, but as the first-born Adam, who emerged from the hands of the Lord, had it, that is, holistically, and it was precisely this nature, such “flesh” that was given to Christ by his Most Pure Mother. A negative condition for this was the absence of human conception “in sin”, i.e. birth without a father. Original sin is transmitted precisely through human conception, and with original sin also bad plurality, egocentrism and limitation. The lack of natural conception was filled by the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Most Holy One. Virgo for spiritual conception. The latter also consisted in the fact that self-denying love for the Born was ignited in the Birthing One. As a result of this love for the Son, a community of life emerged, even bodily, that is, seedless conception. However, a genuine condition was necessary for this: the true nature of the Most Holy Theotokos with Her personal and generic holiness was restored in her sophia, chaste to such an extent that it was possible for the Holy Spirit to descend on Her, giving Her complete sophia. Rev. The Virgin Mary bore the image of Sophia and was the personification of created Sophia when She gave birth to the Lord. Therefore, the fruit of her birth was the Sophian man, the New Adam, who therefore differed from all people in the image of His humanity. This was true humanity, identical with the humanity of each of us (which is why Christ is our “brother” (Heb. 2:12) and yet differs from it in that it does not exclude anyone, but includes everyone, is not limited by anything, but has a holistic image of Chastity, and this was given to Her Son by the Virgin Mary. Protestant Christology admits that Christ in His human nature necessarily contains the whole Adam, otherwise the redemption of the entire human race is completely incomprehensible: an individual, so to speak, partial man cannot have such a meaning. But she, thanks to her lack of feeling for the Mother of God, completely cannot understand how Christ could perceive integral humanity. This remains to be attributed to the miraculous violence against human nature, Deus ex machina, but such an assumption inevitably leads to docetism: Christ assumed a nature different from human, and therefore was not a true man, and therefore could not appear as a redeemer. In Catholic theology, the element of this divine violence against human nature in the 1854 dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God is included in the very origin of the Most Holy. The Virgin, who is thereby removed from the entire human race. This also shakes the very matter of incarnation. However, the universal veneration of the Mother of God in Catholicism, better than an unsuccessful dogma, testifies to her importance in the matter of our salvation. 293 The Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God, as the Queen of Heaven and the created Sophia, contains sufficient grounds for the dogmatic awareness of the idea that integral humanity could only be received from She in whom it was restored in its Sophia image. However, Orthodox theology, partly as a result of sophistication, and partly due to polemical tendentiousness in the fight against Catholic one-sidedness, has not yet realized in dogmatic thought the treasure of revelation about the Mother of God, which is contained in her church veneration. And the meaning of the Mother of God, as created Sophia, who was therefore capable of giving the Sophia image of integral humanity to the One born from her, remains dogmatically unclear. So, the objective relationship of both natures in Christ and the basis for their union is their sophia: the Divine Sophia is united with the created Sophia, the Eternal with the becoming, the Prototype with the image. So yes, it is implied in 4 not Chalcis. dogma. The final question remains about the two natures in Christ: their union. Chalcis. The dogma is limited to the general establishment of the fact of the presence of two natures in Christ in one person, but does not at all concern the image of their union. This question remains the property of theological theologians and is the subject of theological research. First of all, here it is necessary to take stock of both what has been done and, even more so, what has not been done on this issue in the patristic era. Although it is generally accepted, or at least pretended, that everything is fine here, and all Christological questions are essentially resolved, in fact this is far from the case, and moreover, at the very central point - in relation to the Gospel image of Jesus Christ in the light of the basic dogmatic definitions adopted by the Church. It is still necessary to compare and, so to speak, harmonize Christological dogmas and the Gospel, in which their biblical meaning would be revealed. Here we are entering on little-cultivated ground, especially since Biblicalism, in which the newest Christian consciousness has been brought up (for never before has such a study of the biblical text been carried out as in modern times, with all its scientific and exegetical possibilities), makes us especially sensitive to all inconsistencies and ambiguities. From Chalcis. dogma, although it does not concern the image of the union of natures, the fact of the unity of the life of Christ, with two natures, but one hypostasis living in both of them, follows undeniably (that is why this hypostasis in Leontius Viz. and, following him, in St. John Dam. is sometimes called “complex” - in fact, of course, this dual nature of life is complex, but not the hypostasis, which in itself does not allow any complexity). How to understand this complex life in relation to the participation of both natures? This very duality of the natures of a single life presents unprecedented difficulties for thought, because the life of the natural world does not know it at all. But the main difficulty here is created by the fact that these natures do not belong to the same ontological series of the created world, for they are incommensurable with each other, belonging to equal areas of existence: the divine and the created. How can they combine, unite and interact with each other? How does the fire of the Divine clothe, but not burn, the bush of created being, and how can this latter rise into harmony with the life of the divine nature? Do we not have here such an incompatibility that makes the questioning itself imaginary, turning it into myth-making, similar to numerous pagan myths about the descent of gods to earth and union with mortals? After the dogma of two natures in one hypostasis has been established, the center of gravity of Christology, the very grain of its problematics, is located precisely here - in the problem of theanthropic life, as it is revealed to us in the Gospels. We already know from the history of dogma what attempts have been made to cope with this problem about the manner of the union of two natures. The first noteworthy experience was, of course, Apollinarianism. Apollinaris resolved the issue by essentially depriving human nature of hypostasis. Formally, he did this no more than Alexandrianism and Chalcedonism, since in fact he understood the hypostasis of the Logos as a human hypostasis. However, the intention of his Christology was not to reveal the hypostasis of the Logos at the same time as a human hypostasis, but to completely abolish the human hypostasis and thereby diminish the fullness of the humanity of Christ, so that in it it was no longer possible to recognize the presence of a “perfect man.” At the same time, human nature lost the meaning of an original natural principle and received only an instrumental meaning. Mechanicality was introduced into the relationship between natures. These are all the inaccuracies of Apollinaris’s Christology, which, however, do not fit well with her other ideas about God-manhood, heavenly and earthly Adam, pre-eternal man, etc. Therefore, the teaching of Apollinaris remains, as it were, a nodal point from which paths diverge in different directions - on the one hand, into Alexandrianism and various shades of Monophysitism, and on the other, towards Chalcedonian theology (and just not into Antioch). Alexandrian Theology with St. Cyril at the head was imbued with a sincere desire to show the truth of the Incarnation as a genuine combination of the Divine with genuine, and not imaginary, docetic, humanity. And yet, practically dogmatic balance could be maintained here only by inconsistency or logical irresponsibility. But where there is a real test of dogmatic positions, Alexandrian theology slides uncontrollably towards actual docetism. This was the case, for example, with the question of Christ’s ignorance or His human development: St. Cyril was forced to admit that both were only ways of manifesting the Divine, allowed by Him through human nature, but not genuine facts in the life of Christ, and thus the general result of the conclusion was brought to a docetic one. 294 Hence the inevitable bias of Cyril’s theology towards monophysitism, from which he himself abstained in every possible way, but which emerged after him in Eutychianism, 295 dissolving humanity in the Divinity and understanding the relationship of both natures only as a fire consuming brushwood. This also includes various shades of Monophysitism, which stemmed precisely from the rejection of Chalcis. dogma, due to the sincere impossibility of understanding and accepting dual nature with one hypostasis, as a kind of dogmatic charade. In him they were able to see only poorly disguised Nestorianism. We have the second type of resolution of the question of the dual nature of Christ in the Antiochian school (and its belated version - Adoptionism, which in general does not introduce new elements of the problem into the dispute). Antioch sought a solution to the problem of duality in the original duality, not only of natures, but also of hypostases, which, through moral union, agreement in love, form a new hypostasis - the hypostasis of unity. This last thought is undoubtedly the weak side of Antioch, indicating a poor understanding of personality. It is true that one personality can, in the movement of love, come out of itself and, so to speak, move into other personalities, identifying with them in a certain multi-unity, so that a single multi-hypostasis is obtained. We have the prototype of such unity in the Holy Trinity, consubstantial and inseparable, which is a single trinitarian subject, a trinitarian unity of love. In the created world, such a multi-hypostatic unity corresponds to the idea of ​​the Church as the body of Christ, and is realized in its conciliarity. However, this analogy cannot be applied Christologically for lack of a tertium comparationis, a general principle. Both positions under consideration are significantly different in the sense that in the Christological problem, according to the Antiochian understanding, we are talking about nothing less than the reunification of two subjects who have not only different hypostases, but also different natures, while in both the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the Church, we have a multi-hypostatic unity with the unity and identity of nature and life, although it is hypostasized not by one, but by many hypostases. This difference is of decisive importance, and it shows the complete unsuitability of the Antiochian scheme for understanding the unity of the two natures in Christ. The unity of different subjects with different natures, in particular the relationship of man to God, takes place on the basis of the mutual penetration of natures, or rather the entry of one nature into another, which is what we have in the deification of man, but with an unconditional difference in hypostases. A person in relation to God in no way loses his personal self; it does not fade away in the light of the Divine and does not drown in His abyss. Man relates to God as a person to a Person, I to You, even in the fullness of deification, and church love, which unites many hypostases in multi-unity, also does not represent abolition, but only the revelation of personality. Chalcis. the definition, having given a dogmatic scheme, did not add anything to its dogmatic interpretation, which was left to subsequent theology. 296 In the latter one encounters the following most important thoughts on this matter. Firstly, already in the polemic between St. Kirill on the one hand and blessed. Theodoret and Nestorius, on the other hand, discuss the issue of distinguishing between two types of Gospel testimonies about Christ: those relating to Him as a person, or as God. This is sometimes joined by a third, completely unfortunate category, the average, who relate equally to both God and man. However, this category, so misunderstood in this formulation of the question, should truly be the only one, for Christ is the God-man, and not God and man, or something else in between, mixed. St. Cyril against Nestorius denied such a distinction at the high cost of actual docetism, but he was far from being victorious in the dispute with Theodoret, and both sides also argued with mutual anathemas. This same distinction was adopted by subsequent theology (from St. Leo the Great to St. John of Damascus) in a specific form in relation to the miracles of Christ, where an idea was applied that combines the shortcomings of all Christological heresies and represents an unconscious attempt to evade the problem. A complete misunderstanding is the manner, not worthy of dogmatic discussion, although extremely widespread in patristic writing of all directions, of not only illustrating, but explaining the relationship between Divinity and humanity in Christ in the image of fire and iron, a red-hot sword, etc. This also includes the no less widespread and seemingly more subtle and less physical comparison of the relationship of the two natures in Christ with soul and body. Among other things, this explains the unknown through the unknown, for the connection of soul and body is the mystery of the creation of man, no more known to him than the mystery of the union of both natures in Christ. There still remains en-hypostasis - the scholastic idea of ​​L.V., perceived (equally scholastically) by St. John Dam., and from him all the latest school theology. But does this plan to interpret the Divine hypostasis as human, equating it with a physical accident, which hypostasises, instead of one substance, two, says anything to the modern mind? The use of Leontius’s antiquated Aristotelianism for us in this part is meaningless for us, and simply tells us nothing about Christ, But this is all that patristic thought bequeathed to us in the understanding of Chalcis. dogma about the union of two natures, that is, not about the fact of union, which is a self-evident postulate of both thought and faith, but about the image of this union in relation to a single hypostasis. Patristic thought turns in different directions, takes on different means to resolve the issue without tangible success, until it becomes completely exhausted, and in this exhaustion it completely moves away from Christology. However, another significant word was uttered here, which can become a real banner of further Christology. This is literally just a word in the letter of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to Gaius: “godly (feandric) energy.” Divine and therefore actually divine-human, the word God-humanity was thus pronounced as a kind of key to solving the mystery. And this word, expressing the initial concept for modern Christology (and secretly contained already in the teachings of Apollinaris), was immediately heard. St. John of Damascus accepted it as an indisputable and self-understood teaching (while it expresses only the very beginning of Christological problematics) and dedicated a special paragraph and III book to it. Kr. izl. right faith”, where he gave him a common verbal explanation. Through him, the idea of ​​“divine action” was accepted as a kind of dogmatic testament to the entire patristic era, however, remaining a dead capital, still waiting for its implementation. However, this idea was partially realized in the doctrine of μεταδίδωσις τῶν ἰδιωμάτων, commnnicatio idiomatum, or communication of properties. Special attention is also devoted to him by St. John of Damascus, who, it goes without saying, when interpreting this teaching remains within the boundaries set by his Christological doctrine with the actual predominance of Alexandrian monism. He understands the communication of properties, first of all, as the influence of divine nature on human nature as a result of the union of two unequal natures: human nature accepts some properties of divine nature, which is called deification, θέωσις. The general theme of deification can be interpreted in different directions: both Christological and pneumatological. St. John of Damascus takes it only in the first, of course, indisputable sense, namely in relation to the perfect sanctification of the human nature of the Lord Jesus, as a result of which divine worship is equally rendered to Him, in divine and human nature without distinction. Here, of course, it is still necessary to make a distinction between the Lord’s presence in statu exinanitionis and exaltationis, humiliation and glorification, which St. John of Damascus does not. However, the indisputable principle of communicatio idiomatum, applied in the direction of deification, can be introduced into boundaries and receive a correct interpretation only in connection with its disclosure in the direction of the influence of human nature on the divine. And here we see complete confusion. When y St. John of Damascus, and with him all the school theology based on him, in revealing the principle of the communion of properties in Christ, comes to the influence of human nature on the Divine, the matter does not go beyond generalities and vague expressions, and, to tell the truth, the corresponding teaching is simply absent, and its place is only schematically indicated in the denial of Monophysitism. And in fact, given the formulation of the question of two natures, which is given to it in patristic theology, there is simply nothing to say here. After all, here only the perception or assimilation by the Logos, along with His divine nature, of human nature is recognized as external and alien - as a kind of dwelling or clothing, or a necessary means for the redemption of what is perceived. Both natures, so to speak, are statically juxtaposed without any internal correlation. But these natures are essentially unequal. Therefore, divine nature influences human nature, adoring it (just as fire heats iron), and there is no room left for the reverse influence of human nature, as a well-known dynamic relationship. Therefore, in fact, neither “feandric” energy nor the transfer of properties is achieved here. The duality of natures remains unsurmounted, and the practical conclusion is only more or less veiled monophysitism. Patristic theology never found the way to the doctrine of the God-Man and God-Humanity; it knew only God and man, Divinity and humanity, externally coupled, but not internally united. (Therefore, in scholasticism, in Thomas Aquinas, it practically already turns away from the Chalcedonian path and enters a new path - the removal of the duality of natures through the doctrine of the perception of humanity into a single hypostasis, i.e. the question of the unification of nature was transferred from nature to hypostasis). And it should also be noted that to the state of affairs created by Chalcis. definition, did not add anything and did not change the definition of VI all. Council on two energies and two wills. Produced already in the era of the decline of Christological thought and not sufficiently prepared theologically, it was only a new solemn confirmation of the Chalcedonian dogma and some of its concretization. But it did not introduce new elements of the problem, and the same must be said to an even greater extent about the theology of the dogma of the VII Ecumenical Council. Both conciliar definitions, having divinely inspired proclaimed dogmatic truths, left them in the form of dogmatic schemes for future theological comprehension, which, of course, cannot be considered a summing up of the achieved “exposition” of St. John of Damascus. The union of divine and human nature, understood not statically, but dynamically, inevitably leads to the posing of the question, how did this union take place, and what did it mean for both the Divine and humanity? Of course, some general and preliminary answer to this question was given by patristic theology, especially St. Kirill. The acceptance by the higher nature of the lower, the divine human, is obviously a kind of condescension or humiliation, kenosis, on the part of the divine. This is so clearly indicated in the Word of God that its evidence was completely impossible to ignore. And the patristic teaching is characterized by the doctrine of the Incarnation as the kenosis of the Divine (not only by St. Cyril, but also before him, in Western writing, especially by St. Hilary). However, with a static understanding of the Incarnation and with a general Christological ambiguity, which constantly led to fluctuations in the direction of docetism (and specifically with St. Cyril and Hilary), the idea of ​​kenosis, at most, is stated, but not revealed in patristic theology. However, the entire Christological problematic of Chalcis. dogma necessarily leads, as its basis and premise, to the doctrine of the kenosis of the Divine in the Incarnation. This relationship between the variations of the world pattern and its main path can be likened (however, no more than likened) to the statistical average, which expresses the pattern of the series, with all its variations. This is exactly how the law of the world should be understood, indeterministically, and not deterministically, and scientific thought is now moving towards such an understanding. From here comes the simultaneous unconditionality (in relation to the main goal) and conditionality (in relation to the ways to achieve it) of prophecy. “Sometimes I will say about a nation and a kingdom that I will uproot, crush and destroy it. But if this people, to whom I have spoken this, turns from their evil deeds, I put aside the evil that I thought to do to them. And sometimes I will say about a nation and a kingdom that I will establish and establish it; but if he does what is evil in My sight and does not obey My voice, I will cancel the good with which I wanted to benefit Him” (Jer. 17:7-10). The pagans are found guilty only of the fact that, having come to know God, they did not glorify Him as God (Rom. 1:21), but complicated this knowledge of God, “became fussed in their speculations” as a result of the attacks of fallen nature. They sinned before the Divine Sophia, for “they turned the Glory of the incorruptible God into an image” similar to man and animals, that is, they did not recognize the difference between the Glory of God, the Divine Sophia, from the created and fallen Sophia in man. This question poses the blessed. Augustine in De trinitate, lib. II. Wed. 1 Peter 1, 11–12, which speaks of revelation in the prophets by the Spirit of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Cf. and 1 Cor. 2, 10–13, 16, which also speaks of revelation by the Holy Spirit, but also of the mind of Christ given to the apostle. On this occasion, the Roman Catholic Church established its misunderstood dogma of 1854 about the complete removal of the Most Holy. Theotokos from original sin (for criticism of this dogma, see “The Burning Bush”). Sometimes you can find in school dogma the idea that it was the Son of God who had to become incarnate, because in the incarnation He also had to become the Son, albeit a human one - however, without further deepening this, generally fair, thought. The essence of P.S.’s teaching is determined, firstly, by his unitarianism in triadology, and secondly, by his abstract sophiology, according to which Sophia is only the power or ability or “property” of the sole Deity; thirdly, by his Christology: he denies the hypostatic incarnation of the Logos, but only of Sophia, which, however, is also understood not as the Divine nature, but only as a divine power or a gift of grace. This is also reflected in the lack of teaching about the Holy Spirit, which therefore merges with Sophia. It is no coincidence that in the prologue of the Gospel of John, both gospels about the Logos, as the world-creating hypostasis and the incarnate one, are placed side by side: John. 1, 3 and 14. We have a unique version of this teaching in modern theology in Dorner, who understands the incarnation as a process of temporary mutual penetration of two independent natures, as a result of which a divine-human personality arises in them and from them, uniting both of them. Ἀτρέπτως is sometimes referred to as the hypostasis of the Logos (as, for example, Dorner in his polemic with the kenoticists, who allegedly introduced changes into the divine hypostasis). In fact, all four negative definitions clearly refer to natures and their relationships. See all this in “The Burning Bush”: Glorification of the Most Holy. Mother of God. It is sometimes even called co-redemptrix, an expression that is imprecise and ambiguous, but it may contain the meaning that the Most Rev. The Mother of God has a direct and positive participation in the incarnation of God, as the perception of the whole Adam. This feature of the theology of St. K. is shown with complete conviction by Bruce. The humiliation of Christ, lecture II (cf. also Appendix A, 366373). Cp. Ch. Gore. Dissertations on subjects connected with the incarnation. 1895. (The consciousness of our Lord in his horal life). Bruce calls “Eutychianism – simply Cyrillianism gone” 59. Bruce speaks of the image of Christ that is accepted in this era as “an anatomic figure in place of the Christ of the Gospel history” (1. p. 66).