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From John Meyendorff's "Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes" (Fordham Univ. Press). Chapter 2: The Christilogical Issue, (pp.38-39)

In Christ, human nature is united with the hypostasis of the Logos and, while remaining fully itself, is liberated from sin, the source of which is the gnomic will. Because it is "en-hypostasized" in the Logos Himself, Christ's humanity is perfect humanity. In the mysterious process which started with His conception in the Virgin's womb, Jesus passes through natural growth, ignorance, suffering, and even death -- all of them experiences of the fallen humanity which He had come to save -- and He fulfilled through the resurrection the ultimate human destiny. Christ could thus be truly the savior of humanity because in Him there could never be any contradiction between natural will and gnomic will. Through the hypostatic union, His human will, precisely because it always conforms itself to the divine, also performs the "natural movement" of human nature.

The doctrine of "deification" in Maximus is based upon the fundamental patristic presupposition that communion with God does not diminish or destroy humanity, but makes it fully human. In Christ the hypostatic union implies the communication of idioms (perichoresis ton idiomaton). The characteristics of divinity and humanity express themselves "in communion with each other" (Calcedon definition), and human actions, or "energies," have God Himself as their personal agent. It can be said, therefore, that "God was born," that Mary is the Theotokos, and that the "Logos was crucified" -- which birth and death remain purely human realities. But it can and must be said that a man rose from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father, having acquired characteristics which "naturally" belong to God alone; immortality and glory. Through Christ's humanity, deified according to its hypostatic union with the Logos, all members of the Body of Christ have access to "deification" by grace through the operation of the Spirit in Christ's Church.

The essential elements of Maximian Christology provide the permanent terminological and philosophical framework for Byzantine thought and spirituality. They were adopted, together with the Trinitarian doctrine of the great Cappadocian Fathers, in The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of John of Damascus.(first half of the eighth century), which served as a standard doctrinal textbook in Byzantium. They also provided the most authoritative frame of reference in most of the doctrinal controversies which arose in the East during the Middle Ages.

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Good stuff!

WHAT THAT SAYS IS THIS: That since man is made in God's image, even dispite sin, it is "natural" for us to conform to God. (It is sin that is 'unnatural!') That explains how the incarnation could work without some funny-business like Christ having to hold back part of his divinity. Christ's God-nature could be fully God, and his Man-nature fully man. He could be fully ignorant, and also the Wisdom of God--the Word. And it was not problem. And the crux is what is written in Meyendorff above: that in that union the divine did not in any way contradict the human, or over power it!

I WONDER WHETHER IN MOST DISCUSSIONS OF THIS THE CONCERN RESTS IN FEARING THAT THE DIVINE NECESSARILY WOULD OVERPOWER THE HUMAN. What do you think? If that is the concern, then limiting the divine would seem a necessary answer. And all the thinking-contortions that go with it. But... Maybe that is not necessary.

The empasis NEEDS to be on the completeness of Christ's EXPERIENCE of our humanity, and (Now, mind you, I believe in impassability.) on Calvary, the identification of the divine Word with the very real experience of human hell. What? (That's what you are saying; right?) God could not suffer any more than he could die. They are together. YET, because God Personally (Sanders goes at least half way down this road in Risks.) LOVES us. He FREELY loves us. God's Person is not a derivative of his nature (so the Orthodox say). God, though impassible, loved, chose to sacrifice and die, and KNEW the abandonment from Trinitarian Love that by his nature he can't experience. But he KNOWS!


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I'm going to take a break.


Fred

(I'm not Orthodox. I go to a Christian Reformed Church. But I'm enjoying this discussion.)