I saw something in a new way. We’ve talked about the logoi of created things for a long time. And we’ve agreed that the fulfillment of God’s purposes for human beings required the Incarnation regardless of whether sin ever entered the picture (though some dispute this), so that the real necessity of the Incarnation (God’s taking on human nature) to our fulfillment isn’t grounded in or require our sinfulness. Sinfulness is overcome in Christ, yes, and it’s overcome via the Incarnation, yes. But healing us from sinfulness isn’t the ‘fundamental’ vision behind the Incarnation. Our union with God (whatever that means) as finite beings in and of itself is what requires the Incarnation.
I’ve had problems with this. I definitely see that we have to distinguish between God’s telos for human being (the fulfillment of our logoi) on the one hand and the role which the Incarnation plays in healing our sinfulness on the other. The former doesn’t require the latter, though given our sinfulness, there’s no getting to the former except though the latter.
Anyhow, my particular struggle was trying to understand WHY the Incarnation at all would be necessary to our fulfillment (irrespective of the corruption of sinfulness). Supposing humanity never took the sinful route, why and how does the Incarnation necessarily figure into our perfection? This is an important question (though a bit speculative, because we never took the ‘no-evil’ route) because I can’t believe that sin and evil play a ‘necessary’ role in the creation and perfection of created beauty. We can argue about this latter point if you want, but I’m assuming it for now.
So the question for me has been, ‘why’ the Incarnation at all and ‘how’ does it make our fulfillment possible? I was reading Maximus’ “Letter on Love” in Louth Maximus the Confessor when all of a sudden these things all adjusted themselves in a new light and I saw what I had never seen before. Nothing new was added. I was just looking at the same things I’ve been harping on for years from a few angle.
In a nutshell, here’s what I’m seeing—
Human beings are created to become ‘persons’ (i.e., unique and irreducibly creative and loving persons). Personal identity is achieved and fulfilled ecstatically. That is, ‘personhood’ is irreducibly relational. You can’t have just ‘one’ person. The ‘other’ is needed. And each person becomes the full thing it was meant to be by moving outside itself in a recognition and affirmation of the other, and likewise the other in the first, so that ‘you’ (your presence and meaning and involvement) share in ‘constituting’ who ‘I’ am as do ‘I’ share in constituting who ‘you’ are. We have our hypostatic being in one another. There’s no ‘who’ for me, no fulfilled personal identity, that isn’t achieved in this ecstatic movement. Contrary to enlightenment (Cartesian) individualism, a ‘person’ is a creative ecstatic achievement. You find out who you are by moving outside yourself into the selves of others.
The second piece is this—all hypostatic beings (‘persons’) have a nature, a set of capacities that define ‘how’ they achieve and dispose of their personal identities ecstatically. Here’s the important point: if it’s true that any given hypostasis requires ecstatic relations with other hypostases in order to achieve its own full personal potential, then it’s also the case that hypostases can only engage other hypostases of the same ‘kind’ or nature, i.e., who are homo-ousion. There has to be enough similarity between ‘natures’ for two hypostases to relate ecstatically and bring each other to personal fulfillment, because ‘nature’ is the ‘how’ (the scope) by which we achieve and dispose of our personal identities. If that identity requires relational engagement with others, it can only occur within the range of my natural capacities for relating. So the interpersonal engagement occurs via an exchange of natural dispositional capacities (I can have a personal relationship with ‘you’ because we both share the same ‘nature’; I can’t have a personal relationship with a rock or a cow because we don’t enjoy that same ‘natural’ space where we can meet and relate in the necessary ways).
Here is the essential necessity for the Incarnation, then. It has nothing essentially to do with our sinfulness. It has to do with the finite nature of human personal becoming. We can’t become all we can be without relating hypostatically to others. And we can only relate hypostatically to others of the same ‘nature’.
So aren’t other finite human beings enough (especially if sin never corrupted us) ? Can’t finite human beings bring one another to their fullest personal potential? Why does the Son have to incarnate? The reason is that AS FINITE we human persons are all ‘in search of’ the same thing. Our hypostatic natures drive us existentially to find it SOMEWHERE outside ourselves (that’s not bad or sinful), most naturally in other human beings (who share the same nature). But no finite, created being can be the ultimate ground for my own enduring identity. Any person I relate to is gonna be in the same ‘created’ (not sinful) predicament as I am—i.e., it also needs an infinite explanation and ground for its identity IF that identity is to enjoy the hope of perpetual existence and not feel threatened by its own finitude. This couldn’t be gotten around and has nothing to do with sinfulness or evil.
So only an infinite/necessarily existing person can tell us who we truly (permanently) are. And there’s the real need for the Incarnation. The one person who can end the existential longing of all finite human beings can only mediate his own perfecting identity to us finite persons in terms of our own natures. So irrespective of our sinfulness, we still require the Incarnation. The Son is the ONE person who is already what we long to become, who’s personal identity isn’t created or finite or in search of itself like ours. He’s our only hope for PERMANENT, enduring personal fulfillment. And so he takes on our ‘nature’ and relates hypostatically to us as persons in ways (nature) we can perceive, appreciate, appropriate and in which we can rest our identities.
It might not mean that much to ya’ll. But for some reason I just never had a good explanation for the necessity of the Incarnation that didn’t require sin and evil.
Tom
"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual." Nicolas Berdyaev |