For the entire patristic and Byzantine tradition, knowledge of God implies participation in God and includes not only intellectual knowledge but the experience of being in union with God. In the monastic tradition of Macarius, this idea of participation is inseparable from the idea of freedom and of consciousness. A true Christian knows God through a free and conscious experience – a sense of a true friendship with God.

The image and likeness of God in man implies not only an openness of man toward God, but also a function and task of man in the whole of creation. Man is to bear witness to God in creation and, as revealed by God through Jesus, is to be the steward of God’s creation.

Against Origen, the Fathers unanimously affirmed that man is a unity of soul and body. The soul is not just a separate entity trapped within the body. Human beings are made up of both spiritual and physical elements which form a whole. Just as Jesus is both totally and completely God and man, so humans are completely soul and body and together these two elements equal the human person. According to Maximus, body and soul are complementary and cannot exist separately. If primarily directed against the Origenistic idea of the pre-existence of souls (this idea is directly connected with Plato’s idea of the existence of archetypes that are separate from creation), this affirmation raises the issue of the soul’s survival after death. This survival is not denied, of course, but neither is it understood as a liberation from the body, in the Platonic sense. (You will recall that Plato believed that the soul was trapped in the body and just waited to be liberated). The separation of body and soul at death is as contrary to nature as death itself, and the ultimate and eternal survival of the soul is possible only if the whole man is raised from death at the resurrection. Yet the soul’s immortality is not only directed toward the actual resurrection of the whole man; it is also conditioned by the soul’s relationship to God. The dual nature of man is not simply a static juxtaposition of two heterogeneous elements, a mortal body and an immortal soul: it reflects a   dynamic function of man between God and creation. Maximus seems to stress the independence of body and soul, not primarily in order to maintain the immortality of the soul in spite of its relationship to the body, but in order to   underline the creative will of God as the only constitutive fact for both, as well as for their unity. Man is truly man because he is the image of God, and the divine factor in man concerns not only his spiritual aspect but man as a whole being, soul and body. It is God’s infinite power that makes this possible. We remember that Jesus, even in death, remained Jesus the God-man. Death did not separate the divine and the human. A Mystery!