Jesus
Christ
The Incarnation is an
act of God’s philanthropia, of His lovingkindness towards mankind.
Many eastern writers, looking
at the Incarnation from this point of view, have argued that even if
man had never fallen,
God in His love for humanity would still have become man: the Incarnation
must be seen as part of
the eternal purpose of God, and not simply as an answer to the fall.
Such was the view of
Maximus the Confessor and of Isaac the Syrian; such has also been the
view of certain western
writers, most notably Duns Scotus (1265-1308).
But because man fell,
the Incarnation is not only an act of love but an act of salvation. Jesus
Christ, by uniting man
and God in His own person, reopened for man the path to union with
God. In His own person
Christ showed what the true ‘likeness of God’ is, and through His redeeming
and victorious sacrifice
He set that likeness once again within man’s reach. Christ, the
Second Adam, came to
earth and reversed the effects of the first Adam’s disobedience.
The essential elements
in the Orthodox doctrine of Christ have already been outlined in
Chapter 2:true God and
true man, one person in two natures, without separation and without confusion:
a single person, but
endowed with two wills and two energies.
True God and true man;
as Bishop Theophan the Recluse put it: ‘Behind the veil of Christ’s
flesh, Christians behold
the Triune God.’ These words bring us face to face with what is perhaps
the most striking
feature in the Orthodox approach to the Incarnate Christ: an overwhelming
sense of His divine
glory. There are two moments in Christ’s life when this divine glory was
made especially manifest:
the Transfiguration, when on Mount Thabor the uncreated light of His
Godhead shone visibly
through the garments of His flesh; and the Resurrection, when the tomb
burst open under the
pressure of divine life, and Christ returned triumphant from the dead. In
Orthodox
worship and spirituality
tremendous emphasis is placed on both these events. In the Byzantine
calendar the
Transfiguration is reckoned as one of the Twelve Great Feasts, and enjoys a
far greater prominence
in the Church’s year than it possesses in the west; and we have already
seen the central place
which the uncreated light of Thabor holds in the Orthodox doctrine of
mystical prayer. As for
the Resurrection, its spirit fills the whole life of the Orthodox Church:
Through all the
vicissitudes of her history the Greek Church has been enabled to preserve
something
of the very spirit of
the first age of Christianity. Her liturgy still enshrines that element of
sheer joy in the
Resurrection of the Lord that we find in so many of the early Christian writings
(P.
Hammond, The Waters of Marah, p. 20).
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The theme of the
Resurrection of Christ binds together all theological concepts and realities
in eastern Christianity
and unites them in a harmonious whole (O. Rousseau, ‘Incarnation et
anthropologie
en orient et
en occident,’ in Irénikon, vol. 26 (1953), p. 373).
Yet it would be wrong to
think of Orthodoxy simply as the cult of Christ’s divine glory, of
His Transfiguration and
Resurrection, and nothing more. However great their devotion to the divine
glory of Our Lord,
Orthodox do not overlook His humanity. Consider for example the Orthodox
love of the Holy Land:
nothing could exceed the vivid reverence of Russian peasants for
the exact places where
the Incarnate Christ lived as a man, where as a man He ate, taught, suffered,
and died. Nor does the
sense of Resurrection joy lead Orthodoxy to minimize the importance
of the Cross.
Representations of the Crucifixion are no less prominent in Orthodox than in
non-Orthodox churches,
while the veneration of the Cross is more developed in Byzantine than
in Latin worship.
One must therefore
reject as misleading the common assertion that the east concentrates on
the Risen Christ, the
west on Christ Crucified. If we are going to draw a contrast, it would be
more exact to say that
east and west think of the Crucifixion in slightly different ways. The Orthodox
attitude to the
Crucifixion is best seen in the hymns sung on Good Friday, such as the
following:
He who clothes himself
with light as with a garment,
Stood naked at the
judgement.
On his cheek he received
blows
From the hands which he
had formed.
The lawless multitude
nailed to the Cross
The Lord of glory.
The Orthodox Church on
Good Friday thinks not simply of Christ’s human pain and suffering by
itself, but rather of
the contrast between His outward humiliation and His inward glory. Orthodox
see not just the
suffering humanity of Christ, but a suffering God:
Today is hanged upon the
tree
He who hanged the earth
in the midst of the waters.
A crown of thorns crowns
him
Who is the king of the
angels.
He is wrapped about with
the purple of mockery
Who wraps the heaven in
clouds.
Behind the veil of
Christ’s bleeding and broken flesh, Orthodox still discern the Triune God.
Even Golgotha is a
theophany; even on Good Friday the Church sounds a note of Resurrection
joy:
We worship thy Passion,
O Christ:
Show us also thy
glorious Resurrection!
I magnify thy
sufferings,
I praise thy burial and
thy Resurrection.
Shouting, Lord, glory to
thee!
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The Crucifixion is not
separated from the Resurrection, for both are but a single action. Calvary
is seen always in the
light of the empty tomb; the Cross is an emblem of victory. When Orthodox
think of Christ
Crucified, they think not only of His suffering and desolation; they think of Him
as Christ the Victor,
Christ the King, reigning in triumph from the Tree: The Lord came into the
world and dwelt among
men, that he might destroy the tyranny of the Devil and set men free. On
the Tree he triumphed
over the powers which opposed him, when the sun was darkened and the
earth was shaken, when
the graves were opened and the bodies of the saints arose. By death he
destroyed death, and
brought to nought him who had the power of death (From the First
Exorcism
before
Holy Baptism). Christ is our victorious king, not in spite of the Crucifixion, but
because of it:
‘I call Him king,
because I see Him crucified’ (John Chrysostom, Second Sermon on the
Cross and the
Robber, 3 (P.G.
49, 413).
Such is the spirit in
which Orthodox Christians regard Christ’s death upon the Cross. Between
this approach to the
Crucifixion and that of the medieval and post-medieval west, there are
of course many points of
contact; yet in the western approach there are also certain things which
make Orthodox feel
uneasy. The west, so it seems to them, tends to think of the Crucifixion in
isolation, separating it
too sharply from the Resurrection. As a result the vision of Christ as a
suffering
God is in practice
replaced by the picture of Christ’s suffering humanity: the western worshipper,
when he meditates upon
the Cross, is encouraged all too often to feel a morbid sympathy
with the Man of Sorrows,
rather than to adore the victorious and triumphant king. Orthodox feel
thoroughly at home in
the language of the great Latin hymn by Venantius Fortunatus (530-609),
Pange lingua, which hails the Cross
as an emblem of victory:
Sing, my tongue, the
glorious battle,
Sing the ending of the
fray;
Now above the Cross, our
trophy,
Sound the loud triumphal
lay:
Tell how Christ, the
world’s redeemer,
As a victim won the day.
They feel equally at
home in that other hymn by Fortunatus, Vexilla regis:
Fulfilled is all that
David told
In true prophetic song
of old:
Among the nations God,
said he,
Hath reigned and
triumphed from the Tree.
But Orthodox feel less
happy about compositions of the later Middle Ages such as Stabat Mater:
For his people’s sins,
in anguish,
There she saw the victim
languish,
Bleed in torments, bleed
and die:
Saw the Lord’s anointed
taken;
Saw her Child in death
forsaken;
Heard his last expiring
cry.
It is significant that Stabat
Mater, in the course of its sixty lines, makes not a single reference to
the Resurrection.
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Where Orthodoxy sees
chiefly Christ the Victor, the late medieval and post-medieval west
sees chiefly Christ the
Victim. While Orthodoxy interprets the Crucifixion primarily as an act of
triumphant victory over
the powers of evil, the west particularly since the time of Anselm of
Canterbury (?1033-1109)
— has tended rather to think of the Cross in penal and juridical terms,
as an act of
satisfaction or substitution designed to propitiate the wrath of an angry
Father.
Yet these contrasts must
not be pressed too far. Eastern writers, as well as western, have applied
juridical and penal
language to the Crucifixion; western writers, as well as eastern, have
never ceased to think of
Good Friday as a moment of victory. In the west during recent years
there has been a revival
of the Patristic idea of Christus Victor, alike in theology, in
spirituality,
and in art; and Orthodox
are naturally very happy that this should be so.
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