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John 4:7-13, 19-21 says, "Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit.... We love because he first loved us. If any one says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.

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The Coptic Church And Dogmas -- Part III section 1

1. The "Trinitarian" faith solves many problems which was caused by the absolute "monotheistic" faith. For example, we say that God is love and His love is eternal; does this mean that there was another being whom God loved eternally? We can not say that He loves Himself eternally; this means He is selfish (God forbids!). We cannot say that He eternally loved by power and not by action, and after the creation of the heavenly and earthly beings His love became in action; this means that creation was necessary for God to realize His love and changes it from power to action.

What we say concerning love might be repeated in regards to other divine characteristics like peace-making, mercy etc..

Truly if we accept the Holy Trinity as three Hypostaseis in one divine essence, this problem will be easily solved. This faith in the One God of three Hypostasies declares the act of love, unity and peace in God as an eternal action of the Holy Trinity. The Father loved the Son and there was no time when the Father did not love the Son. Love as a divine character was eternally in power and in action, for "Love" is God Himself who loved eternally, and was not in need of the creation to declare His characteristic' s. God's love to us is an extension of His work and eternal loving nature. Then the Trinitarian faith reveals God as a dynamic, personal and communal Being and not a solid being.

http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/thecopticchurch/church3-1.html

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Unity of Love

God the Trinity is not a frozen entity, not something static or lifeless. On the contrary, within the Trinity there is the plenitude of life and love. ‘God is love’, says St John the Theologian (1 John 4:8; 4:16). Yet there can be no love without the beloved. A lonely, isolated monad can love only itself: self-love is not love. An egocentric unit is not a personality. As the human person cannot experience his personhood save through communion with other persons, so in God there can be no personal being save through love for another personal being. God the Trinity is the plenitude of love, each hypostatic Person exists in a relationship of love for the other Persons.

The Trinity is therefore a relational entity. The relations between the three Persons are relations between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, or ‘I’ and ‘He’. ‘Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee’, says Christ (John 17:21). Concerning the Holy Spirit, our Lord says, ‘All that the Father has is Mine; therefore I said that he will take what is Mine and declare it to you’ (John 16:15). We read in St John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God’ (John 1:1). The Greek text actually says ‘and the Word was towards God’ (pros ton Theon). This underscores the personal nature of the relationship between God the Word and God the Father: the Son is not only born from the Father, He not only exists with the Father, He is turned towards the Father. Thus each Hypostasis in the Trinity is turned towards the other Hypostases.

The icon of the Holy Trinity by St Andrei Rublev portrays three angels sitting at a table upon which is a Cup, the symbol of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice; the three Persons of the Trinity turn simultaneously to each other and to the Cup. The icon has captured the divine love which reigns within the Trinity. The greatest manifestation of this love was the incarnation of the Son of God for the redemption of humanity. Orthodox Tradition regards Christ’s saving sacrifice as a common act of love and self-emptying of all three Persons of the Trinity. It is in this sacrifice that the love which exists within the Trinity was given and became known to humans. As St Philaret of Moscow said, it is the ‘crucifying love of the Father, the crucified love of the Son, and the love of the Holy Spirit triumphing through the power of the Cross’.

Copied from http://www.or.ru/catech/ on January 20, 1998
http://www.geocities.com/canonical_orthodox_2000/RussianCatechism.html

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Man

d. Person

We might dare to summarize the orthodox ecclesial interpretation of the "image" in the following formulation: Man has been endowed by God with the gift of being a person, with personhood, which is to exist in the same mode in which God exists. What constitutes the divinity of God is His personal Existence, the Trinity of Personal Hypostases which make up the divine Being, the diving Nature or Essence, in a life of love, which is a life of freedom from any necessity.

God is God since he is a Person, that is since his Existence does not depend on anything, not even his Nature or Essence. As a Person– that is freely– he constitutes his Essence or Nature; it is not his Nature or Essence which makes his Existence obligatory. He exists, since he freely wills to exist, and this willing is actualized as love, as a triadic communion. Therefore, God is love (1 Jn 4.16), his own Being is love.

And God has imprinted this same possiblity of personal existence on human nature. Human nature is created, a given; it is not the personal freedom of man which constitutes his being, which makes up his essence or nature. But this created nature exists only as a personal hypostasis of life; each one is a personal existence which can hypostasize life as love, that is as freedom from the limitations of his created nature, as freedom from every necessity– just like the uncreated God.

Still more schematically: God is a Nature and three Persons; man is a nature and "innumerable" persons. God is consubstantial and in three hypostases, man is consubstantial and in innumerable hypostases. The difference of natures, the difference of uncreated and created, can be transcended at the level of the common mode of existence, the mode of personal existence– and this truth has been revealed to us by the incarnation of God, by the Person of Jesus Christ. For man to be an image of God means that each one can realize his existence as Christ realizes life as love, as freedom and not as natural necessity. Each can realize his existence as a person, like the Persons of the triadic Divinity. Consequently, man can realize his existence as eternity and incorruptibility, just as the divine life of triadic co-inherence and communion is eternal and incorruptible.

http://www.jbburnett.com/yannaras/yannaras-man.html

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Christos Yannaras
Elements of Faith
(T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1991), Chapter 7: pp. 53-88.

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Man

i. The power of love

The distinction of the sexes has its foundation in the nature, but it is not identical with the nature, just as it is not to be identified even with the hypostasis of man. It is one of the energies of the nature about which we have spoken above, one of the ways in which the existential reality of the nature operates, the unique, distinct and unrepeatable character of every specific human hypostasis. The science of psychology today assures us that the erotic urge does not appear in man simply at the age when it is needed to serve the propagation of the species. But from the first moment of his birth, the erotic impulse toward the mother constitutes the first possibility of a vital relationship– a possibility which makes up the personality itself of man and the beginning of his entry into the world of people, into the area of life as communion.

Without the distinction of the sexes and the erotic impulse which accompanies it, the fact of relationship, of communion, of love, of eros, would perhaps be defined at the level of behaviour, of communication, of a simple psychological bond. Thanks to the distinction of the sexes, eros is an impulse and presupposition of life, the fundamental presupposition for the realization and manifestation of the personal hypostasis of life. The personal hypostasis of man, even in its biological origin, is a fruit of the eros of two other people. But the composition itself and manifestation of the personhood of the subject is a result of the possibility of relationship, of communion, of erotic reference. The relationship of the infant with its mother is erotic, not of course because it intends the perpetuation of the species, but because it is a relationship constitutive of life. The mother transmits life to the baby, not metaphorically and symbolically, but literally and really: She gives it the nourishment which is a presupposition of life, and with it the caress, the affection, the first words which are addressed to it; that is, she gives it the first possibility of relationship, the feeling of a personal presence without which the baby can never enter the world of people, the world of language and of symbols, of existential identity and names.

The connection of sexual distinction with the creation of man "in the image of God" is not, then, by chance or simply metaphorical or by analogy. Man is the image of God since he is a person, a personal existence. But the person differs from the biological individual, precisely since his existence itself is not naturally given, but is realized as an event of erotic relationship and communion. The distinction of the sexes permits man to give a physical hypostasis (an hypostasis of nature) to his personal existence– permits the personal reference to be effected as an event constitutive of the hypostasis and unifying for the nature of man.

Therefore it is not chance either that God's relationship with man (the principal relationship constitutive of life as a personal hypostasis) is always portrayed by the erotic relationship of a man and woman. When Israel is unfaithful to God and worships idols, the prophets charge that he is committing adultery Uer 13.27), dishonoring the uniqueness of the relationship by which God had elevated him to the place of the "beloved" (Hos 2.23; Rm 9.25). The relationship of God with his people, with each member of his people, is a nuptial secret, erotic, and this is the only reason, for the ecclesial interpretation at least, that a clearly erotic song, the Song of Songs, takes a place among the books of the Old Testament.

But the erotic relationship of God with Israel is only an image and copy of the union which God has realized with humanity in the Person of Christ and by means of his body which is the Church. This is the "great mystery" which the Apostle Paul describes in his Letter to the Ephesians (5.23-33) and which the parables of the Gospels portray with scenes taken from wedding dinners and banquets. In the New Testament, Christ is the bridegroom of the Church and the bridegroom of the soul of each one of us– God is passionately in love with the person of each human. And especially in the Gospel of John, eternal life which Christ comes to give us is defined by the verb "to know", which always renders the Hebrew word which means, in biblical language, the erotic relationship of a man and a woman: "Eternal life is this, to know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" Un 17.3).

In the patristic tradition, God himself in his internal triadic life will be defined as "the whole of eros", the falness of continuous erotic unity: "This eros is love, and it is written, that God is love". And this eros is ecstatic, "stimulating the erotic inclination of God' I which founds and constitutes the beings "outside him": "He, the cause of the universe . . . through the superabundance of his erotic goodness . . . is outside of himself ... and it is as if he feels fascinated by ... love and eros; and he descends from the condition of preeminence before the universe and of separation from the universe." The only way for man to describe the experience of receiving this eros and his response to it is again the relationship of man and woman: "Love for you has come upon me as the love of women." In the ascetical literature, the copy of the love of God for man and of man for God likewise is to be sought in the forms of human eros and especially of bodily love, not of the idealistic forms of platonic nostalgia: "Let bodily love be an example for you of the desire for God". "The most passionate lover of his own beloved does not desire, as God desires the soul he desires to repent. "Blessed is the one who has acquired such desire for God, as that which the passionate lover has for his beloved.

If love as we usually know it expresses more a blind and instinctive impulse for selfish pleasure and not the liberation of the person from the necessities and demands of nature (given that life is supposed to be accomplished as a loving coinherence of two persons), this is because we know love in its fallen condition, we know it as sin, that is, as an existential failure and loss of its purpose and goal. But even in the condition of the fall and of sin, love makes possible the natural union of two different hypostases and the formation of new personal hypostases, because something is preserved from the power to love which has been imprinted on our nature as an image of God. It is the power of love which makes possible the union not only of different hypostases, but also of different natures, and shows man to be "a participant in the divine nature , the whole man to be "co-inhering totally with the whole God and becoming all that God is, except for the identity of essence" The writer of the Areopagitic texts sees an "obscure echo" of this power to love even in the dissolute who "desires the worst life in accord with an unreasonable lust". And St Maximus Confessor recognizes even in the erotic attraction of animals without reason, as in the attractive power which forms the "common alleluia" of the whole creation, a single erotic impulse and movement turning back to the single form of divine life.

All this means that for ecclesial anthropology, the distinction of the sexes neither serves simply the physical expedient of perpetuation of the species, nor only an extension of social roles an extension which permits the creation of the "cell" of social life which is the family. Before anything else, the distinction of the sexes in man and the erotic attraction of heterosexual existences leads the general erotic impulse placed in the nature to its "natural" end and purpose: It serves the imaging in nature of the triadic mode of life– the personal coinherence of life within the limits of created nature. It intends finally the deifying union of man with God.

If man refuses this goal and purpose, love is perverted into an eneluctable suffering of the nature: The nature suffers love, endures it as a tormenting and always unfulfilled desire for existential completion and a relentless expedient for perpetuation of the species. Sin is precisely the failure of love to realize the goal which it has in view, which is the union of man with God. Love is transformed into an everlasting repetition of the tragedy of the Danaids, into an insatiable impulse for the satisfaction of nature, hedonism and pleasure of individual senses. It is no longer an event of communion and loving relationship, but a subordination of the other to subjective demand and the need for sensual pleasure.

Only when the love which is directed to the person of the other sex leads to the loving transcendence of physical individuality (which means: for man to go beyond his individuality, his private desires, needs and demands, to cease to aim at individual survival and to begin to live forJoy of the other, from love for the other), only then is the way freed for man's response to the erotic call of God and for love to become a way of life and a gift of life. Therefore the love of Christ for the Church, to the point of the cross (Eph 5.23-33), is also an xample of conjugal eros, the willing mortification of physical individuality if life is to be realized only as love and self-offering. First Christ incarnates the example of "real love" and makes possible our own erotic reference to his Person: "He first loved us," says Photius the Great, "while we were enemies and hostile. And he not only loved, but he was also dishonoured on our behalf and was smitten and crucified and counted among the dead; and through all these things he presented his love for us".

Within the Church, which is the place of the Kingdom of God– the place where the triadic way of "real life" is realized– "there is neither male nor female" (Gal 3.28).

Within the Church we exist in the manner in which we will exist even after the death of our physical individuality: Not with the powers and abilities of our nature, its psychosomatic energies, but thanks to the love of God "who calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Rom 4.17)– thanks to his own erotic call which constitutes our existence as an event of communion with Him.

This does not mean that our nature is taken away within the space of the Kingdom. It means that the way by which our nature is hypostasized (becomes an hypostasis) is transformed. Nature does not become any longer an hypostasis (a particular living existence) thanks to its own functions and energies, but thanks to the call of God's love. Therefore we no longer have any need to pass by way of the natural possibility of the distinction of the sexes in order to realize our natural existence as an hypostasis of life, that is, of love and communion.

The gospel word wishes to mark this reality when it affirms that in the area of "real life" sexuality is abolished, the distinction of the sexes is abolished: "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage; for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection" (Lk 20.34-36, RSV).

The resurrection which abolishes the marital relationship, as it also abolishes death, is a resurrection "from the dead". It presupposes the death of the autonomous physical mode for the composition of our hypostasis, the willing or unwilling death of the individual who draws his existence from the strengths and energies of his nature. It is necessary that a death interpose in order that "what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor 5.4, RSV). The monastics of the Church willingly brave this death. They refuse marriage, the natural way for the erotic self-transcendence of individuality and attempt the leap to hypostasize eros and the body in the mod, of the Kingdom, to exist only by obedience and spiritual exercise, only by self-renunciation from nature, to draw existence and life only from the call of love which God addresses to man.

Accordingly, the monastics of the Church are the pioneers and the first-fruits of the Kingdom– the Kingdom which is being brought to birth secretly within the bosom of the Church. We others, the majority, have need of a "helper" (Gen 2.18) of the other sex in order to arrive, with the example of Christ's cross, at the death and resurrection which the monastics attain with a leap. And both roads– both the monastic and the married– are equally revered and considered worthy within the Church, since the goal of them both is the same: Life free from space, time, corruption and death.

http://www.jbburnett.com/yannaras/yannaras-man.html

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a. Image
b. Soul
c. Rationality– free will– dominion
d. Person

...also...

i. The power of love
k. Consequences of the fall: nakedness
l. Consequences of the fall: guilt
m. Consequences of the fall: the tragedy of creation
n. Consequences of the fall: anxiety before death
o. Consequences of the fall: the “coats of skin”