As I suggested in the last issue of this article, the Eastern Fathers of the Church maintained that the Incarnation of God as a human being had cosmic significance. It renewed creation. In fact, the Fathers talk about the New Creation that resulted from God’s action of actually entering into human history and actually taking on human nature.

The cosmic dimension of the Incarnation is implied in the definition produced by the Council of Chalcedon (451), to which Byzantine theology remains faithful: “Christ is of one substance with us in His humanity, ‘like unto us in all things save sin.’” He is God and man for “the distinction of natures is in no way abolished because of the union; rather, the characteristic properties of each nature are preserved.” The last sentence of the definition covers, obviously, the creative, inventive, controlling functions of man in the cosmos. The idea is developed in the theology of Maximus the Confessor, when he argues against the Monothelites, for the existence in Christ of a human will, or energy, stressing that without it authentic humanity is inconceivable. If Christ’s manhood is identical with outs in all things except sin, one must admit that Christ, who is man in His body, in His soul and in His mind, was indeed acting with all these functions of true humanity. As Maximus fully understood, Christ’s human energy or will was not superseded by His divine will, but accepted conformity with it. “The two natural wills of Christ are not contrary to each other…but the human will follows the divine.” This conformity of the human with the divine in Christ is, therefore, not a diminution of humanity, but its restoration: “Christ restores nature to conformity with itself….Becoming man, He keeps His free will in impassibility and peace with nature.” “Participation” in God is the very nature of man, not its abolition. This is the key to Eastern Christian understanding of the God-man relationship.

[You will recall the Chalcedon, which was the fourth Ecumenical Council and ranks as probably the second most important of the first seven Councils, clearly defined Christ as having two natures, divine and human, and condemned Monophysitism].

In Christ, the union of the two natures is hypostatic: they “concur into one person and one hypostasis” (underlying state or underlying substance – the fundamental reality that supports all else) according to the Fathers of Chalcedon. Indeed the controversies which arose from the Chalcedonian formula led to further definitions of the meaning of the term hypostasis.

We must remember that the Church struggled for many centuries to come to an agreed upon understanding of Who Christ is and what it meant, in human words, that God became incarnate – became man.