REDEMPTION

«THE WORD BECAME FLESH,» in this is the ultimate joy of the Christian faith. In this is the fulness of Revelation. The Same Incarnate Lord is both perfect God and perfect man. The full significance and the ultimate purpose of human existence is revealed and realized in and through the Incarnation. He came down from Heaven to redeem the earth, to unite man with God for ever. «And became man.» The new age has been initiated. We count now the «anni Domini.» As St. Irenaeus wrote: «the Son of God became the Son of Man, that man also might become the son of God.»¹²⁰ Not only is the original fulness of human nature restored or re-established in the Incarnation. Not only does human nature return to its once lost communion with God. The Incarnation is also the new Revelation, the new and further step. The first Adam was a living soul. But the last Adam is the Lord from Heaven [1Cor. 15:47]. And in the Incarnation of the Word human nature was not merely anointed with a superabundant overflowing of Grace, but was assumed into an intimate and hypostatical unity with the Divinity itself. In that lifting up of human nature into an everlasting communion with the Divine Life, the Fathers of the early Church unanimously saw the very essence of salvation, the basis of the whole redeeming work of Christ. «That is saved which is united with God,» says St. Gregory of Nazianzus. And what was not united could not be saved at all. This was his chief reason for insisting, against Apollinarius,¹²¹ on the fulness of human nature, assumed by the Only Begotten in the Incarnation. This was the fundamental motive in the whole of early theology, in St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and St. Maximus the Confessor. The whole history of Christological dogma was determined by this fundamental conception: the Incarnation of the Word as Redemption. In the Incarnation human history is completed. God’s eternal will is accomplished, «the mystery from eternity hidden and to angels unknown.» The days of expectation are over. The Promised and the Expected has come. And from henceforth, to use the phrase of St. Paul, the life of man «is hid with Christ in God» [Colossians 3:3]…

The Incarnation of the Word was an absolute manifestation of God. And above all it was a revelation of Life. Christ is the Word of Life, ὁ λόγος της ζωῆς… «and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us» [I John l:l–2].¹²² The Incarnation is the quickening of man, as it were, the resurrection of human nature. But the climax of the Gospel is the Cross, the death of the Incarnate. Life has been revealed in full through death. This is the paradoxical mystery of the Christian faith: life through death, life from the grave and out of the grave, the mystery of the life-bearing grave. And we are born to real and eternal life only through our baptismal death and burial in Christ; we are regenerated with Christ in the baptismal font. Such is the invariable law of true life. «That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die» [I Cor. 15:36].

«Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh» [I Timothy 3:16]. But God was not manifest in order to recreate the world at once by the exercise of His omnimpotent might, or to illuminate and transfigure it by the overwhelming light of His glory. It was in the uttermost humiliation that this revelation of Divinity was wrought. The Divine will does not abolish the original status of human freedom or «self-power» [τὸ αὐτεξούσιον], it does not destroy or abolish the «ancient law of human freedom.»¹²³ Herein is revealed a certain self-limitation or «kenosis» of the Divine might. And more than that, a certain kenosis of Divine Love itself. Divine love, as it were, restricts and limits itself in the maintenance of the freedom of the creation. Love does not impose the healing by compulsion as it might have done. There was no compelling evidence in this manifestation of God. Not all recognized the Lord of Glory under that «guise of the servant» He deliberately took upon Himself. And whosoever did recognize, did so not by any natural insight, but by the revelation of the Father [cf. Matt. 16:17]. The Incarnate Word appeared on earth as man among men. This was the redeeming assumption of all human fulness, not only of human nature, but also of all the fulness of human life. The Incarnation had to be manifested in all the fulness of life, in the fulness of human ages, that all that fulness might be sanctified. This is one of the aspects of the idea of the «summing up» of all in Christ (recapitulatio, ἀνακεϕαλαίωσις) which was taken up with such emphasis by St. Irenaeus from St. Paul.¹²⁴ This was the «humiliation» of the Word [cf. Phil. 2:7]. But this «kenosis» was no reduction of His Divinity, which in the Incarnation continues unchanged, ανευ τροπης. It was, on the contrary, a lifting-up of man, the «deification» of human nature, the «theosis.» As St. John Damascene says, in the Incarnation «three things were accomplished at once: the assumption, the existence, and the deification of humanity by the Word.»¹²⁵ It must be stressed that in the Incarnation the Word assumes the original human nature, innocent and free from original sin, without any stain. This does not violate the fulness of nature, nor does this affect the Saviour’s likeness to us sinful people. For sin does not belong to human nature, but is a parasitic and abnormal growth. This point was vigorously stressed by St. Gregory of Nyssa and particularly by St. Maximus the Confessor in connection with their teaching of the will as the seat of sin.¹²⁶ In the Incarnation the Word assumes the first-formed human nature, created «in the image of God,» and thereby the image of God is again re-established in man.¹²⁷ This was not yet the assumption of human suffering or of suffering humanity. It was an assumption of human life, but not yet of human death. Christ’s freedom from original sin constitutes also His freedom from death, which is the «wages of sin.» Christ is unstained from corruption and mortality right from His birth. And like the first Adam before the Fall, He is able not to die at all, potens non mori, though obviously He can still die, potens autem mori. He was exempt from the necessity of death, because His humanity was pure and innocent. Therefore Christ’s death was and could not but be voluntary, not by the necessity of fallen nature, but by free choice and acceptance.¹²⁸

A distinction must be made between the assumption of human nature and the taking up of sin by Christ. Christ is «the Lamb of God that taketh the sin of the world» [John 1:29].¹²⁹ But He does not take the sin of the world in the Incarnation. That is an act of the will, not a necessity of nature. The Saviour bears the sin of the world (rather than assumes it) by the free choice of love. He bears it in such a way that it does not become His own sin, or violate the purity of His nature and will. He carries it freely; hence this «taking up» of sin has a redeeming power, as a free act of compassion and love.¹³⁰ This taking up of sin is not merely a compassion. In this world, which «lies in sin,» even purity itself is suffering, it is a fount or cause of suffering. Hence it is that the righteous heart grieves and aches over unrighteousness, and suffers from the unrighteousness of this world. The Saviour’s life, as the life of a righteous and pure being, as a life pure and sinless, must inevitably have been in this world the life of one who suffered. The good is oppressive to this world, and this world is oppressive to the good. This world resists good and does not regard light. And it does not accept Christ, it rejects both Him and His Father [John 15:23–24]. The Saviour submits Himself to the order of this world, forbears, and the very opposition of this world is covered by His all-forgiving love: «They know not what they do» [Luke 23:34]. The whole life of Our Lord is one Cross. But suffering is not yet the whole Cross. The Cross is more than merely suffering Good. The sacrifice of Christ is not yet exhausted by His obedience and endurance, forbearance, compassion, all-forgivingness. The one redeeming work of Christ cannot be separated into parts. Our Lord’s earthly life is one organic whole, and His redeeming action cannot be exclusively connected with any one particular moment in that life. However, the climax of this life was its death. And the Lord plainly bore witness to the hour of death: «For this cause came I unto this hour» [John 12:27]. The redeeming death is the ultimate purpose of the Incarnation.¹³¹

The mystery of the Cross is beyond our rational comprehension. This «terrible sight» seems strange and startling. The whole life of Our Blessed Lord was one great act of forbearance, mercy and love. And the whole of it is illuminated by the eternal radiance of Divinity, though that radiance is invisible to the world of flesh and sin. But salvation is completed on Golgotha, not on Tabor, and the Cross of Jesus was foretold even on Tabor [cf. Luke 9:31]. Christ came not only that He might teach with authority and tell people the name of the Father, not only that He might accomplish works of mercy. He came to suffer and to die, and to rise again. He Himself more than once witnessed to this before the perplexed and startled disciples. He not only prophesied the coming Passion and death, but plainly stated that He must, that He had to, suffer and be killed. He plainly said that «must,» not simply «was about to.» «And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again» [Mark 8:31; also Matthew 16:21; Luke 9:22; 24:26]. «Must» [δει] not just according to the law of this world, in which good and truth is persecuted and rejected, not just according to the law of hatred and evil. The death of Our Lord was in full freedom. No one takes His life away. He Himself offers His soul by His own supreme will and authority. «I have authority,» – ἐξουσίαν ἔχω – [John 10:18]. He suffered and died, «not because He could not escape suffering, but because He chose to suffer,» as it is stated in the Russian Catechism. Chose, not merely in the sense of voluntary endurance or nonresistance, not merely in the sense that He permitted the rage of sin and unrighteousness to be vented on Himself. He not only permitted but willed it. He «must have died according to the law of truth and love. In no way was the Crucifixion a passive suicide or simply murder. It was a Sacrifice and an oblation. He had to die. This was not the necessity of this world. This was the necessity of Divine Love. The mystery of the Cross begins in eternity, «in the sanctuary of the Holy Trinity, unapproachable for creatures.» And the transcendent mystery of God’s wisdom and love is revealed and fulfilled in history. Hence Christ is spoken of as the Lamb, «who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world» [Peter 1:19], and even «that hath been slain from the foundation of the world» [Rev. 13:8].¹³² «The Cross of Jesus, composed of the enmity of the Jews and the violence of the Gentiles, is indeed but the earthly image and shadow of this heavenly Cross of love.»¹³³ This «Divine necessity» of the death on the Cross passes all understanding indeed. And the Church has never attempted any rational definition of this supreme mystery. Scriptural terms have appeared, and do still appear, to be the most adequate ones. In any case, no merely ethical categories will do. The moral, and still more the legal or juridical conceptions, can never be more than colorless anthropomorphism. This is true even of the idea of sacrifice. The sacrifice of Christ cannot be considered as a mere offering or surrender. That would not explain the necessity of the death. For the whole life of the Incarnate One was one continuous sacrifice. Why then was this purest life yet insufficient for victory over death? Why was death vanquished only by death? And was death really a terrifying prospect for the Righteous One, for the Incarnate One, especially in the supreme foreknowledge of the coming Resurrection on the third day? But even ordinary Christian martyrs have accepted all their torments and sufferings, and death itself, in full calm and joy, as a crown and a triumph. The Chief of martyrs, the Protomartyr Christ Himself, was not less than they. And, by the same «Divine decree,» by the same «Divine necessity,» He «must» not only have been executed and reviled, and have died, but also have been raised on the third day. Whatever may be our interpretation of the Agony in the Garden, one point is perfectly clear. Christ was not a passive victim, but the Conqueror, even in His uttermost humiliation. He knew that this humiliation was no mere endurance or obedience, but the very path of Glory and of the ultimate victory. Nor does the idea of Divine justice alone, justitia vindicativa, reveal the ultimate meaning of the sacrifice of the Cross. The mystery of the Cross cannot be adequately presented in terms of the transaction, the requital, or the ransom.¹³⁴ If the value of the death of Christ was infinitely enhanced by His Divine Personality, the same also applies to the whole of His life. All His deeds have an infinite value and significance as the deeds of the Incarnate Word of God. And they cover indeed superabundantly both all misdeeds and sinful shortcomings of the fallen human race. Finally, there could hardly be any retributive justice in the Passion and death of the Lord, which might possibly have been in the death of even a righteous man. For this was not the suffering and death of a mere man, graciously supported by the Divine help because of his faithfulness and endurance. This death was the suffering of the Incarnate Son of God Himself, the suffering of unstained human nature already deified by its assumption into the hypostasis of the Word. Nor is this to be explained by the idea of a substitutional satisfaction, the satisfactio vicaria of the scholastics. Not because substitution is not possible. Christ did indeed take upon Himself the sin of the world. But because God does not seek the sufferings of anyone, He grieves over them. How could the penal death of the Incarnate, most pure and undefiled, be the abolition of sin, if death itself is the wages of sin, and if death exists only in the sinful world? Does Justice really restrain Love and Mercy, and was the Crucifixion needed to disclose the pardoning love of God, otherwise precluded from manifesting itself by the restraint of vindicatory justice? If there was any restraint at all, it was rather a restraint of love. And justice was accomplished, in that Salvation was wrought by condescension, by a «kenosis,» and not by omnipotent might. Probably a recreation of fallen mankind by the mighty intervention of the Divine omnipotence would have seemed to us simpler and more merciful. Strangely enough, the fulness of the Divine Love, which is intent to preserve our human freedom, appears to us rather as a severe request of transcendent justice, simply because it implies an appeal to the cooperation of the human will. Thus Salvation becomes a task for man himself also, and can be consummated only in freedom, with the response of man. The «image of God» is manifested in freedom. And freedom itself is all too often a burden for man. And in a certain sense it is indeed a superhuman gift and request, a supernatural path, the path of «deification,» theosis. Is not this very theosis a burden for a self-imprisoned, selfish, and self-sufficient being? And yet this burdensome gift of freedom is the ultimate mark of the Divine love and benevolence towards man. The Cross is not a symbol of Justice, but the symbol of Love Divine. St. Gregory of Nazianzus utters all these doubts with great emphasis in his remarkable Easter Sermon:

To whom, and why, is this blood poured out for us and shed, the great and most precious blood of God, the High Priest and Victim?... We were in the power of the Evil One, sold to sin, and had brought this harm on ourselves by sensuality… If the price of ransom is given to none other than him in whose power we are held, then I ask, to whom and for what reason is such a price paid?... If it is to the Evil One, then how insulting is this! The thief receives the price of ransom; he not only receives it from God, but even receives God Himself. For his tyranny he receives so large a price that it was only right to have mercy upon us… If to the Father, then first, in what way? Were we not in captivity under Him?... And secondly, for what reason? For what reason was the blood of the Only Begotten pleasing to the Father, Who did not accept even Isaac, when offered by his father, but exchanged the offering, giving instead of the reasonable victim a lamb?

By all these questions St. Gregory tries to make clear the inexplicability of the Cross in terms of vindicatory justice. And he concludes: «From this it is evident that the Father accepted [the sacrifice], not because He demanded or had need, but by economy and because man had to be sanctified by the humanity of God.»¹³⁵

Redemption is not just the forgiveness of sins, it is not just man’s reconciliation with God. Redemption is the abolition of sin altogether, the deliverance from sin and death. And Redemption was accomplished on the Cross, «by the blood of His Cross» [Col. 1:20; cf. Acts 20:28; Rom. 5:9; Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:14; Heb. 9:22; I John 1:7; Rev. 1:5–6; 5:9]. Not by the suffering of the Cross only, but precisely by the death on the Cross. And the ultimate victory is wrought, not by sufferings or endurance, but by death and resurrection. We enter here into the ontological depth of human existence. The death of Our Lord was the victory over death and mortality, not just the remission of sins, nor merely a justification of man, nor again a satisfaction of an abstract justice. And the very key to the Mystery can be given only by a coherent doctrine of human death.

In separation from God human nature becomes unsettled, goes out of tune, as it were, is decomposed. The very structure of man becomes unstable. The unity of the soul and the body becomes insecure. The soul loses its vital power, is no more able to quicken the body. The body is turned into the tomb and prison of the soul. And physical death becomes inevitable. The body and the soul are no longer, as it were, secured or adjusted to each other. The transgression of the commandment «reinstated man in the state of nature,» says St. Athanasius, εἰς τὸ κατὰ ϕύσιν ἐπέστρεϕεν «that as he was made out of nothing, so also in his very existence he suffered in due time corruption according to all justice.» For, being made out of nothing, the creature also exists over an abyss of nothingness, ever ready to fall into it. The created nature, St. Athanasius says, is mortal and infirm, «flowing and liable to decomposition,» ϕύσις ρευστὴ καὶ διαλυομένη. And it is only saved from this «'natural corruption» by the power of heavenly Grace, «by the indwelling of the Word.» Thus separation from God leads the creature to decomposition and disintegration.¹³⁶ «For we must needs die, and are as water split on the ground which cannot be gathered up again» [2 Samuel 14:14].

In Christian experience death is first revealed as a deep tragedy, as a painful metaphysical catastrophe, as a mysterious failure of human destiny. For death is not a normal end of human existence. Just the contrary. Man’s death is abnormal, is a failure. God did not create death; He created man for incorruption and true being, that we «might have being,» εἰς τὸ είναι [cf. Wisdom 6:18 and 2:23]. The death of man is the «wages of sin» [Romans 6:23]. It is a loss and corruption. And since the Fall the mystery of life is displaced by the mystery of death. What does it mean for a man to die? What is actually dying is obviously the body, for only the body is mortal and we speak of the «immortal» soul. In current philosophies nowadays, the «immortality of the soul» is emphasized to such an extent that the «mortality of man» is almost overlooked. In death this external, visible, and earthly bodily existence ceases. But yet, by some prophetic instinct, we say that it is «the man» who dies. For death surely breaks up human existence, although, admittedly, the human soul is «immortal,» and personality is indestructible. Thus the question of death is first the question of the human body, of the corporeality of man. And Christianity proclaims not only the after-life of the immortal soul, but also the resurrection of the body. Man became mortal in the Fall, and actually dies. And the death of man becomes a cosmic catastrophe. For in the dying man, nature loses its immortal center, and itself, as it were, dies in man. Man was taken from nature, being made of the dust of the earth. But in a way he was taken out of nature, because God breathed into him the breath of life. St. Gregory of Nyssa comments on the narrative of Genesis in this way. «For God, it says, taking dust from the earth, fashioned man and by His own breath planted life in the creature which He formed, in order that the earthly element might be raised by union with the Divine, and so the Divine grace in one even course might uniformly extend through all creation, the lower nature being mingled with that which is above the world.»¹³⁷… Man is a sort of «microcosm,» every kind of life is combined in him, and in him only the whole world comes into contact with God.¹³⁸ Consequently man’s apostasy estranges the whole creation from God, devastates it, and, as it were, deprives it of God. The Fall of man shatters the cosmic harmony. Sin is disorder, discord, lawlessness. Strictly speaking it is only man that dies. Death indeed is a law of nature, a law of organic life. But man’s death means just his fall or entanglement into this cyclical motion of nature, just what ought not to have happened at all. As St. Gregory says, «from the nature of dumb animals mortality is transferred to a nature created for immortality.» Only for man is death contrary to nature and mortality is evil.¹³⁹ Only man is wounded and mutilated by death. In the generic life of dumb animals, death is rather a natural moment in the development of the species; it is the expression rather of the generating power of life than of infirmity. However, with the fall of man, mortality, even in nature, assumes an evil and tragic significance. Nature itself, as it were, is poisoned by the fatal venom of human decomposition. With dumb animals, death is but the discontinuation of individual existence. In the human world, death strikes at personality, and personality is much greater than mere individuality. It is the body that becomes corruptible and liable to death through sin. Only the body can disintegrate. Yet it is not the body that dies, but the whole man. For man is organically composed of body and soul. Neither soul nor body separately represents man. A body without a soul is but a corpse, and a soul without body is a ghost. Man is not a ghost sans-corpse, and corpse is not a part of man. Man is not a «bodiless demon,» simply confined in the prison of the body. Mysterious as the union of soul andy body indeed is, the immediate consciousness of man witnesses to the organic wholeness of his psycho-physical structure. This organic wholeness of human composition was from the very beginning strongly emphasized by all Christian teachers.¹⁴⁰ That is why the separation of soul and body is the death of the man himself, the discontinuation of his existence, of wholeness, i.e. of his existence as a man. Consequently death and the corruption of the body are a sort of fading away of the «image of God» in man. St. John Damascene, in one of his glorious anthems in the Burial Service, says of this: «I weep and I lament, when I contemplate death, and see our beauty, fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb disfigured, dishonored, bereft of form.»¹⁴¹ St. John speaks not of man’s body, but of man himself. «Our beauty in the image of God,» ἡ κατ’ εἰκόνα Θεοῦ πλασϑεῖσα ὡραιότης, this is not the body, but man. He is indeed an «image of the unfathomable glory» of God, even when wounded by sin, εἰκὼν ἀρρήτου δόξης.¹⁴² And in death it is disclosed that man, this «reasonable statue» fashioned by God, to use the phrase of St. Methodius,¹⁴³ is but a corpse. «Man is but dry bones, a stench and the food of worms.» This is the riddle and the mystery of death. «Death is a mystery indeed: for the soul by violence is severed from the body, is separated, by the Divine will, from the natural connection and composition… О marvel! Why have we been given over unto corruption, and why have we been wedded unto death?» In the fear of death, often so petty and faint-hearted, there is revealed a profound metaphysical alarm, not merely a sinful attachment to the earthly flesh. In the fear of death the pathos of human wholeness is manifested. The Fathers used to see in the unity of soul and body in man an analogy of the indivisible unity of two natures in the unique hypostasis of Christ. Analogy may be misleading. But still by analogy one may speak of man as being just «one hypostasis in two natures,» and not only of, but precisely in two natures. And in death this one human hypostasis is broken up. Hence the justification for the mourning and weeping. The terror of death is only warded off by the hope of the resurrection and life eternal.

However, death is not just the self-revelation of sin. Death itself is already, as it were, the anticipation of the resurrection. By death God not only punishes but also heals fallen and ruined human nature. And this not merely in the sense that He cuts the sinful life short by death and thereby prevents the propagation of sin and evil. God turns the very mortality of man into a means of healing. In death human nature is purified, pre-resurrected as it were. Such was the common opinion of the Fathers. With greatest emphasis this conception was put forward by St. Gregory of Nyssa. «Divine providence introduced death into human nature with a specific design,» he says, «so that by the dissolution of body and soul, vice may be drawn off and man may be refashioned again through the resurrection, sound, free from passions, pure, and without any admixture of evil.» This is particularly a healing of the body. In St. Gregory’s opinion, man’s journey beyond the grave is a means of cleansing. Man’s bodily structure is purified and renewed. In death, as it were, God refines the vessel of our body as in a refining furnace. By the free exercise of his sinful will man entered into communion with evil, and our structure became alloyed with the poison of vice. In death man falls to pieces, like an earthenware vessel, and his body is decomposed again in the earth, so that by purification from the accrued filth he may be restored to his normal form, through the resurrection. Consequently death is not an evil, but a benefit (εὐεργεσία). Death is the wages of sin, yet at the same time it is also a healing process, a medicine, a sort of fiery tempering of the impaired structure of man. The earth is, as it were, sown with human ashes, that they may shoot forth in the last day, by the power οf God; this was the Pauline analogy. The mortal remains are committed to the earth unto the resurrection. Death implies within itself a potentiality of resurrection. The destiny of man can be realized only in the resurrection, and in the general resurrection. But only the Resurrection of Our Lord resuscitates human nature and makes the general resurrection possible. The potentiality of resurrection inherent in every death was realized only in Christ, the «first-fruits of them that are asleep» [1Cor. 15:20].¹⁴⁴

Redemption is above all an escape from death and corruption, the liberation of man from the «bondage of corruption» [Romans 8:21], the restoration of the original wholeness and stability of human nature. The fulfilment of redemption is in resurrection.

It will be fulfilled in the general «quickening» when «the last enemy shall be abolished, death» [1Cor. 15:26: ἔσχατος ἐχϑρός]. But the restoration of unity within human nature is possible only through a restoration of the union of man with God. The resurrection is possible only in God. Christ is the Resurrection and the Life. «Unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility,» says St. Irenaeus. The way and the hope of the resurrection is revealed only through the Incarnation of the Word.¹⁴⁵ St. Athanasius expresses this point even more emphatically. The mercy of God could not permit «that creatures once made rational, and having partaken of the Word, should go to ruin and turn again to non-existence by the way of corruption.» The violation of the law and disobedience did not abolish the original purpose of God. The abolition of that purpose would have violated the truth of God. But human repentance was insufficient. «Penitence does not deliver from the state of nature [into which man has relapsed through sin], it only discontinues the sin.» For man not only sinned but fell into corruption. Consequently the Word of God descended and became man, assumed our body, «that, whereas man turned towards corruption, he might turn them again towards incorruption, and quicken them from death by appropriation of his body and by the grace of the Resurrection, banishing death from them like a straw from the fire.»¹⁴⁶ Death was grafted on to the body, then life must be grafted on to the body again, that the body may throw off corruption and be clothed in life. Otherwise the body would not be raised. «If death had been kept away from the body by a mere command, it would nonetheless have been mortal and corruptible, according to the nature of our bodies. But that this should not be, it put on the incorporeal Word of God, and thus no longer fears either death or corruption, for it has life as a garment, and corruption is done away in it.»¹⁴⁷ Thus, according to St. Athanasius, the Word became flesh in order to abolish corruption in human nature. However, death is vanquished, not by the appearance of Life in the mortal body, but rather by the voluntary death of the Incarnate Life. The Word became incarnate on account of death in the flesh, St. Athanasius emphasizes. «In order to accept death He had a body,» and only through His death was the resurrection possible.¹⁴⁸

The ultimate reason for Christ’s death must be seen in the mortality of man. Christ suffered death, but passed through it and overcame mortality and corruption. He quickened death itself. By His death He abolishes the power of death. «The dominion of death is cancelled by Thy death, О Strong One.» And the grave becomes the life-giving «source of our resurrection.» And every grave becomes rather a «bed of hope» for believers. In the death of Christ, death itself is given a new meaning and significance. «By death He destroyed death.»

Death is a catastrophe for man; this is the basic principle of the whole Christian anthropology. Man is an «amphibious» being, both spiritual and corporeal, and so he was intended and created by God. Body belongs organically to the unity of human existence. And this was perhaps the most striking novelty in the original Christian message. The preaching of the Resurrection as well as the preaching of the Cross was foolishness and a stumbling-block to the Gentiles. The Greek mind was always rather disgusted by the body. The attitude of an average Greek in early Christian times was strongly influenced by Platonic or Orphic ideas, and it was a common opinion that the body was a kind of a «prison,» in which the fallen soul was incarcerated and confined. The Greeks dreamt rather of a complete and final disincarnation. The famous Orphic slogan was: σῶμα-σῆμa.¹⁴⁹ And the Christian belief in a coming Resurrection could only confuse and frighten the Gentile mind. It meant simply that the prison will be everlasting, that the imprisonment will be renewed again and for ever. The expectation of a bodily resurrection would befit rather an earthworm, suggested Celsus, and he jeered in the name of common sense. This nonsense about a future resurrection seemed to him altogether irreverent and irreligious. God would never do things so stupid, would never accomplish desires so criminal and capricious, which are inspired by an impure and fantastic love of the flesh. Celsus nicknames Christians a «φιλοσώματον γένος,» «a flesh-loving crew,» and he refers to the Docetists with far greater sympathy and understanding.¹⁵⁰ Such was the general attitude to the Resurrection.

St. Paul had already been called a «babbler» by the Athenian philosophers just because he had preached to them «Jesus and the Resurrection» [Acts 17:18, 32]. In the current opinion of those heathen days, an almost physical disgust of the body was frequently expressed. There was also a wide-spread influence from the farther East; one thinks at once of the later Manichean inundation which spread so rapidly all over the Mediterranean. St. Augustine, once a fervent Manichean himself, has intimated in his Confessiones that this abhorrence of the body was the chief reason for him to hesitate so long in embracing the faith of the Church, the faith in the Incarnation.¹⁵¹

Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, tells that Plotinus, it seemed, «was ashamed to be in the flesh,» and from this Porphyry starts his biography. «And in such a frame of mind he refused to speak either of his ancestors or parents, or of his fatherland. He would not sit for a sculptor or painter to make a permanent image of this perishable frame.» It is already enough that we bear it now [Life of Plotinus, 1]. This philosophical asceticism, of course, must be distinguished from Oriental asceticism, Gnostic or Manichean. Plotinus himself wrote very strongly «against Gnostics.» Here, however, there was only a difference of motives and methods. The practical issue in both cases was one and the same, a «retreat» from this corporeal world, an escape from the body. Plotinus suggested the following analogy: Two men live in the same house. One of them blames the builder and his handiwork, because it is made of inanimate wood and stone. The other praises the wisdom of the architect, because the building is so skillfully erected. For Plotinus this world is not evil, it is the «image» or reflection of the world above, and is perhaps even the best of images. Still, one has to aspire beyond all images, from the image to the prototype, from the lower to the higher world. And Plotinus praises not the copy, but the pattern.¹⁵² «He knows that when the time comes, he will go out and will no longer have need of a house.» This phrase is very characteristic. The soul is to be liberated from the ties of the body, to be disrobed, and then it will ascend to its proper sphere.¹⁵³ «The true awakening is the true resurrection from the body, not with body. For the resurrection with the body would be simply a passage from one sleep to another, to some other dwelling. The only true awakening is an escape from all bodies, since they are by nature opposite to the nature of the soul. Both the origin, and the life and the decay of bodies show that they do not correspond to the nature of the souls.»¹⁵⁴ With all Greek philosophers the fear of impurity was much stronger than the dread of sin. Indeed, sin to them just meant impurity. This «lower nature,» body and flesh, a corporeal and gross substance, was usually presented as the source and seat of evil. Evil comes from pollution, not from the perversion of the will. One must be liberated and cleansed from this filth.

And at this point Christianity brings a new conception of the body as well. From the beginning Docetism was rejected as the most destructive of temptations, a sort of dark anti-gospel, proceeding from Anti-Christ, «from the spirit of falsehood» [1 John 4:2–3]. This was strongly emphasized in St. Ignatius, St. Irenaeus, and Tertullian. «Not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life» [2Cor. 5:4]. This is precisely the antithesis to Plotinus’ thought.¹⁵⁵ «He deals a death-blow here to those who depreciate the physical nature and revile our flesh,» commented St. John Chrysostom. «It is not flesh, as he would say, that we put off from ourselves, but corruption; the body is one thing, corruption is another. Nor is the body corruption, nor corruption the body. True, the body is corrupt, but it is not corruption. The body dies, but it is not death. The body is the work of God, but death and corruption entered by sin. Therefore, he says, I would put off from myself that strange thing which is not proper to me. And that strange thing is not the body, but corruption. The future life shatters and abolishes not the body, but that which clings to it, corruption and death.¹⁵⁶ Chrysostom, no doubt, gives here the common feeling of the Church. «We must also wait for the spring of the body,» as a Latin apologist of the second century put it – «expectandum nobis etiam et cor ports ver est."¹⁵⁷ A Russian scholar, V. F. Em, speaking of the catacombs, happily recalls these words in his letters from Rome. «There are no words which could better render the impression of jubilant serenity, the feeling of rest and unbounded peacefulness of the early Christian burial places. Here the body lies, like wheat under the winter shroud, awaiting, anticipating and foretelling the other-worldly eternal Spring.»¹⁵⁸ This was the simile used by St. Paul. «So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption» [1Cor. 15:42]. The earth, as it were, is sown with human ashes in order that it may bring forth fruit, by the power of God, on the Great Day. «Like seed cast on the earth, we do not perish      when we die,      but having been sown, we rise.»¹⁵⁹ Each grave is already the shrine of incorruption. Death itself is, as it were, illuminated by the light of triumphant hope.¹⁶⁰

There is a deep distinction between Christian asceticism and the pessimistic asceticism of the non-Christian world. Father P. Florenskii describes this contrast in the following way: «One is based on the bad news of evil dominating the world, the other on the good news of victory, of the conquest of evil in the world. The former offers superiority, the latter holiness. The former type of ascetic goes out in order to escape, to conceal himself; the latter goes out in order to become pure, to conquer.»¹⁶¹ Continence can be inspired by different motives and different purposes. There was, certainly, some real truth in the Orphic or Platonic conceptions as well. And indeed only too often the soul lives in the bondage of the flesh. Platonism was right in its endeavor to set free the reasonable soul from the bondage of fleshly desires, in its struggle against sensuality. And some elements of this Platonic asceticism were absorbed into the Christian synthesis. And yet the ultimate goal was quite different in the two cases. Platonism longs for the purification of the soul only. Christianity insists on the purification of the body as well. Platonism preaches the ultimate disincarnation. Christianity proclaims the ultimate cosmic transfiguration. Bodily existence itself is to be spiritualized. There is the same antithesis of eschatological expectation and aspiration: «to be unclothed» and «to be clothed upon,» again and for ever. And strange enough, in this respect Aristotle was much closer to Christianity than Plato.

In the philosophical interpretation of its eschatological hope, Christian theology from the very beginning clings to Aristotle.¹⁶² On this point he, the writer of prose amid the throng of poets, sober among the inspired, points higher than the «divine» Plato. Such a biased preference must appear altogether unexpected and strange. For, strictly speaking, in Aristotle there is not and cannot be any «after-death» destiny of man. Man in his interpretation is entirely an earthly being. Nothing really human passes beyond the grave. Man is mortal through and through like everything else earthly; he dies never to return. Aristotle simply denies personal immortality. His singular being is not a person. And what does actually survive is not properly human and does not belong to individuals; it is a «divine» element, immortal and eternal.¹⁶³ But yet in this weakness of Aristotle is his strength. Aristotle had a real understanding of the unity of human existence. Man is to Aristotle, first of all, an individual being, an organism, a living unit. And man is one just in his duality, as an «animated body» (τὸ ἔμψυχον); both of the elements in him exist only together, in a concrete and indivisible correlation. Into the «body» the matter is «formed» by the soul, and the soul realizes itself only in its body. «Hence there is no need to inquire whether soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the imprint (το σχῆμα) are one, or, in general, whether the matter of a thing is the same with that of which it is the matter» [De anima, 417b 6]. The soul is just the «form» of the body (εἶδος καὶ μορϕή, 407b 23; λόγος τις καὶ εἶδος, 411a 12), its «principle» and «term» (ἀρχὴ and τέλος), its very being and «actuality.»¹⁶⁴ And Aristotle coins a new term to describe this peculiar correlation: the soul is ἐντελέχεια «the first actuality of a natural body» (ἐντελέχεια ἡ πρώτη σώματος ϕυσικου, 412a 27). Soul and body, for Aristotle they are not even two elements, combined or connected with each other, but rather simply two aspects of the same concrete reality.¹⁶⁵ «Soul and body together constitute the animal. Now it needs no proof that the soul cannot be separated from the body» (413a 4). Soul is but the functional reality of the corresponding body. «Soul and body cannot be defined out of relation to each other; a dead body is properly only matter; for the soul is the essence, the true being of what we call body.»¹⁶⁶ Once this functional unity of the soul and body has been broken by death, no organism is there any more, the corpse is no more a body, and a dead man can hardly be called man at all.¹⁶⁷ Aristotle insisted on a complete unity of each concrete existence, as it is given hic et nunc. The soul «is not the body, but something belonging to the body (σώματος δέτι), and therefore resides in the body and, what is more, in a specific body (καὶ ἐν σώματι τοιούτῳ). Our predecessors were wrong in endeavoring to fit the soul into a body without further determination of the nature and qualities of that body, although we do not even find that of any two things taken at random the one will admit the other (του τυχόντος… το τυχόν). For the actuality of each thing comes naturally to be developed in the potentiality of each thing; in other words, in the appropriate matter» (4l4a 20: τη οικεία ὕλη).

The idea of the «transmigration» of souls was thus to Aristotle altogether excluded. Each soul abides in its «own» body, which it creates and forms, and each body has its «own» soul, as its vital principle, «eidos» or form. This anthropology was ambiguous and liable to a dangerous interpretation. It easily lends itself to a biological simplification and transformation into a crude naturalism, in which man is almost completely equated with other animals. Such indeed were the conclusions of certain followers of the Stagirite, of Aristoxenus and Dikaearchus, for whom the soul was but a «harmony» or a disposition of the body (ἁρμονία or τόνος, «tension») and of Strato etc.¹⁶⁸ «There is no more talk about the immaterial soul, the separate reason, or pure thought. The object of science is the corporate soul, the united soul and body.»¹⁶⁹ Immortality was openly denied. The soul disappears just as the body dies; they have a common destiny. And even Theophrastes and Eudemus did not believe in immortality.¹⁷⁰ For Alexander of Aphrodisias the soul was just an «εἶδος ἔνυλον.»¹⁷¹ Aristotle himself has hardly escaped these inherent dangers of his conception. Certainly, man is to him an «intelligent being,» and the faculty of thinking is his distinctive mark.¹⁷² Yet, the doctrine of Nous does not fit very well into the general frame of the Aristotelian psychology. It is obviously the most obscure and complicated part of his system. Whatever the explanation of this incoherence may be, the stumbling-block is still there. «The fact is that the position of νοῦς in the system is anomalous.»¹⁷³ The «intellect» does not belong to the concrete unity of the individual organism, and it is not an ἐντελέχεια of any natural body. It is rather an alien and «divine» element, that comes in somehow «from outside.» It is a «distinct species of soul» (ψυχῆς γένος ἕτερον), which is separable from the body, «unmixed» with the matter. It is impassive, immortal and eternal, and therefore separable from the body, «as that which is eternal from that which is perishable.»¹⁷⁴ This impassive or active intellect does survive all individual existences indeed, but it does not properly belong to individuals and does not convey any immortality to the particular beings.¹⁷⁵ Alexander of Aphrodisias seems to have grasped the main idea of the Master. He invented the term itself: νους ποιητικός. In no sense is it a part or power of the human soul. It supervenes as something really coming in from outside. It is a common and eternal source of all intellectual activities in individuals, but it does not belong to any one of them. Rather is it an eternal, imperishable, self-existing substance, an immaterial energy, devoid of all matter and potentiality. And, obviously, there can be but one such substance. The νοῦς ποιητικός is not only «divine,» it must be rather identified with the deity itself, the first cause of all energy and motion.¹⁷⁶

The real failure of Aristotle was not in his «naturalism,» but in that he could not see any permanence of the individual. But this was rather a common failure of the whole of ancient philosophy. Plato has the same short sight. Beyond time, Greek thought visualizes only the «typical,» and nothing truly personal. Personality itself was hardly known in pre-Christian times. Hegel suggested, in his Aesthetics, that Sculpture gives the true key to the whole of Greek mentality.¹⁷⁷ Recently a Russian scholar, A. F. Lossev, pointed out that the whole of Greek philosophy was a «sculptural symbolism.» He was thinking especially of Platonism. «Against a dark background, as a result of an interplay and conflict of light and shadow, there stands out a blind, colorless, cold, marble and divinely beautiful, proud and majestic body, a statue. And the world is such a statue, and gods are statues; the city-state also, and the heroes, and the myths, and ideas, all conceal underneath them this original sculptural intuition… There is no personality, no eyes, no spiritual individuality. There is a «something,» but not a «someone,» an individualized «it,» but no living person with his proper name… There is no one at all. There are bodies, and there are ideas. The spiritual character of the ideas is killed by the body, but the warmth of the body is restrained by the abstract idea. There are here beautiful, but cold and blissfully indifferent statues.¹⁷⁸ And yet, in the general frame of such an impersonalist mentality, Aristotle did feel and understand the individual more than anyone else. He got closer than anybody else to the true conception of human personality. He provided Christian philosophers with all the elements out of which an adequate conception of personality could be built up. His strength was just in his understanding of the empirical wholeness of human existence.¹⁷⁹

Aristotle’s conception was radically transformed in its Christian adaptation, for new perspectives were opened, and all the terms were given a new significance. And yet one cannot fail to acknowledge the Aristotelian origin of the main eschatological ideas in early Christian theology. Such a christening of Aristotelianism we find in Origen, to a certain extent in St. Methodius of Olympus as well, and later in St. Gregory of Nyssa. The idea of ἐντελέχεια itself now receives new depth in the new experience of spiritual life. The term itself was never used by the Fathers, but there can be no doubt about the Aristotelian roots of their conceptions.¹⁸⁰ The break between intellect, impersonal and eternal, and the soul, individual but mortal, was healed and overcome in the new self-consciousness of a spiritual personality. The idea of personality itself was a great Christian contribution to philosophy. And again, there was here a sharp understanding of the tragedy of death also.

The first theological essay on the Resurrection was written in the middle of the second century by Athenagoras of Athens. Of the many arguments he puts forward, his reference to the unity and integrity of man is of particular interest. Athenagoras proceeds from the fact of this unity to the future resurrection. «God gave independent being and life neither to the nature of the soul by itself, nor to the nature of the body separately, but rather to men, composed of soul and body, so that with these same parts of which they are composed, when they are born and live, they should attain after the termination of this life their common end; soul and body compose in man one living entity.» There would no longer be a man, Athenagoras emphasizes, if the completeness of this structure were broken, for then the identity of the individual would be broken also. The stability of the body, its continuity in its proper nature, must correspond to the immortality of the soul. «The entity which receives intellect and reason is man, and not the soul alone. Consequently man must for ever remain composed of soul and body. And this is impossible, if there is no resurrection. For if there is no resurrection, human nature is no longer human.¹⁸¹

Aristotle concluded from the mortality of the body that the individual soul, which is but the vital power of the body, is also mortal. Both go down together. Athenagoras, on the contrary, infers the resurrection of the body from the immortality of the reasonable soul. Both are kept together.¹⁸² The resurrection, however, is no mere simple return or repetition. The Christian dogma of the General Resurrection is not that «eternal return» which was professed by the Stoics. The resurrection is the true renewal, the transfiguration, the reformation of the whole creation. Not just a return of what has passed away, but a heightening, a fulfillment of something better and more perfect. «And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel… It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body» [1Cor. 15:37, 44]. A very considerable change is implied. And there is here a very real philosophical difficulty. How are we to think of this «change» so that «identity» shall not be lost? We find in the early writers merely an assertion of this identity, without any attempt at a philosophical explanation. St. Paul’s distinction between the «natural» body (σῶμα ϕυσικὸν) and the «spiritual» body (σῶμα πνευματικὸν) obviously needs some further interpretation [cf. the contrast of the body «of our humiliation,» της ταπεινώσεως ημών, and the body «of His glory,» της δόξης αὐτοῦ, in Phil. 3:21].

In the period of the early controversies with the Docetists and Gnostics, a careful and precise answer became urgent. Origen was probably the first who attempted to give one. Origen’s eschatology was from the very beginning vigorously denounced by many, indeed with good reason, and his doctrine of the Resurrection was perhaps the chief reason why his orthodoxy was challenged. Origen himself never claimed any formal authority for his doctrine. He offered merely some explanation, to be tested and checked by the mind of the Church. For him it was not enough to refer simply to Divine omnipotence, as the earlier writers sometimes did, or to quote certain appropriate passages of Holy Scripture. One had rather to show how the doctrine of the Resurrection fitted into the general conception of human destiny and purpose. Origen was exploring a via media between the fleshly conception of the simpliciores and the denial of the Docetists: «fugere se et nostrorum cames, et haereticorum phantasmata,» as St. Jerome puts it.¹⁸³ And both were dissatisfied and even offended¹⁸⁴.

The General Resurrection is an article of faith indeed. The same individuals will rise, and the individual identity of the bodies will be preserved. But this does not imply for Origen any identity of material substance, or identity of status. The bodies indeed will be transfigured or transformed in the Resurrection. In any case, the risen body will be a «spiritual» body, and not a fleshly one. Origen takes up the simile of St. Paul. This fleshly body, the body of this earthly life, is buried in the earth, like a seed that is sown, and disintegrates. And one thing is sown, and another rises. The germinating power is not extinguished in the dead body, and in due season, by the word of God, the new body will be raised, like the ear that shoots forth from the seed. Some corporeal principle remains undestroyed and unaffected by the death. The term Origen used was obviously Aristotelian: «το εἶδος,» «species,» or «form.» But it is not the soul that Origen regards as the form of the body. It is rather a certain potential corporeality, pertaining to each soul and to each person. It is the forming and the quickening principle of the body, just a seed capable of germination. Origen also uses the term λόγος σπερματικός, ratio seminalis.¹⁸⁵ It is impossible to expect that the whole body should be restored in the resurrection, since the material substance changes so quickly and is not the same in the body even for two days, and surely it can never be reintegrated again. The material substance in the risen bodies will be not the same as in the bodies of this life (τὸ ὑλικὸν ὑποκείμενον οὐδέποτε ἔχει ταυτόν). Yet the body will be the same, just as our body is the same throughout this life in spite of all changes of its material composition. And again, a body must be adapted to the environment, to the conditions of life, and obviously in the Kingdom of Heaven the bodies cannot be just the same as here on earth. The individual identity is not compromised, because the «eidos» of each body is not destroyed (το εἶδος το χαρακτηρίζον τὸ σῶμα). It is the very principium individuationis. To Origen the «body itself» is just this vital principle. His εἶδος closely corresponds to Aristotle’s ἐντελέχεια. But with Origen this «form» or germinative power is indestructible; that makes the construction of a doctrine of the resurrection possible. This «principle of individuation» is also principium surgendi. In this definite body the material particles are composed or arranged just by this individual «form» or λόγος. Therefore, of whatever particles the risen body is composed, the strict identity of the psycho-physical individuality is not impaired, since the germinative power remains unchangeable.¹⁸⁶ Origen presumes that the continuity of individual existence is sufficiently secured by the identity of the reanimating principle.

This view was more than once repeated later, especially under the renewed influence of Aristotle. And in modern Roman theology the question is still rather open: to what extent the recognition of the material identity of the risen bodies with the mortal ones belongs to the essence of the dogma.¹⁸⁷ The whole question is rather that of metaphysical interpretation, not a problem of faith. It may even be suggested that on this occasion Origen expresses not so much his own, as rather a current opinion. There is very much that is questionable in Origen’s eschatological opinions. They cannot be regarded as a coherent whole. And it is not easy to reconcile his «Aristotelian» conception of the resurrection with a theory of the pre-existence of souls, or with a conception of the periodical recurrent cycles of worlds and final annihilation of matter. There is no complete agreement between this theory of the Resurrection and the doctrine of a «General apokatastasis» either. Many of Origen’s eschatological ideas may be misleading. Yet his speculation on the relation between the fleshly body of this life and the permanent body of the resurrection was an important step towards the synthetic conception of the Resurrection. His chief opponent, St. Methodius of Olympus, does not seem to have understood him well. St. Methodius’ criticisms amounted to the complete rejection of the whole conception of the είδος. Is not the form of the body changeable as well as the material substance? Can the form really survive the body itself, or rather is it dissolved and decomposed, when the body of which it is the form dies and ceases to exist as a whole? In any case the identity of the form is no guarantee of personal identity, if the whole material substratum is to be entirely different. For St. Methodius the «form» meant rather merely the external shape of the body, and not the internal vital power, as for Origen. And most of his arguments simply miss the point. But his emphasis on the wholeness of the human composition was a real complement to Qrigen’s rather excessive formalism.¹⁸⁸

St. Gregory of Nyssa in his eschatological doctrine endeavored to bring together the two conceptions, to reconcile the truth of Origen with the truth of Methodius. And this attempt at a synthesis is of exceptional importance.¹⁸⁹ St. Gregory starts with the empirical unity of body and soul, its dissolution in death. And the body severed from the soul, deprived of its «Vital power» (ζωτικὴ δύναμις),¹⁹⁰ by which the corporeal elements are held and knit together during life, disintegrates and is involved into the general circulation of matter. The material substance itself, however, is not destroyed, only the body dies, not its elements. Moreover, in the very disintegration the particles of the decaying body preserve in themselves certain «signs» or «marks» of their former connection with their own soul (τὰ σημεια του ἡμετέρου συγκρίματος). And again, in each soul also certain «bodily marks» are preserved, as on a piece of wax – certain signs of union. By a «power of recognition» (γνωστικῇ τη δυνάμει), even in the separation of death, the soul somehow remains nevertheless near the elements of its own decomposed body (του οἰκείου ἐϕαπτομένη). In the day of resurrection each soul will be able by these double marks to «recognize» the familiar elements. This is the «εἶδος» of the body, its «inward image,» or «type.» St. Gregory compares this process of the restoration of the body with the germination of a seed, with the development of the human foetus. He differs sharply from Origen on the question as to what substance will constitute the bodies of the resurrection, and he joins here St. Methodius. If the risen bodies were constructed entirely from the new elements, that «would not be a resurrection, but rather the creation of a new man,» καὶ οὐκέτι ἂν εἰη τὸ τοιουτον ἀνάστασις, ἀλλὰ καινου ἀνθρώπου δημιουργία.¹⁹¹ The resurrected body will be reconstructed from its former elements, signed or sealed by the soul in the days of its incarnation, otherwise it would simply be another man. Nevertheless, the resurrection is not just a return, nor is it in any way a repetition of present existence. Such a repetition would be really an «endless misery.» In the resurrection human nature will be restored not to its present, but to its normal or «original» condition. Strictly speaking, it will be for the first time brought into that state, in which it ought to have been, had not sin and the Fall entered the world, but which was never realized in the past. And everything in human existence, which is connected with instability, is not so much a return as a consummation. This is the new mode of man’s existence. Man is to be raised to eternity, the form of time falls away. And in the risen corporeality all succession and change will be abolished and condensed. This will be not only an ἀποκατάστασις, but rather a «recapitulatio.» The evil surplus, that which is of sin, falls away. But in no sense is this a loss. The fulness of personality will not be damaged by this subtraction, for this surplus does not belong to the personality at all. In any case, not everything is to be restored in human composition. And to St. Gregory the material identity of the body of the resurrection with the mortal body means, rather, the ultimate reality of the life once lived, which must be transferred into the future age. Here again he differs from Origen, to whom this empirical and earthly life was only a transient episode to be ultimately forgotten. For St. Gregory the identity of the form, i.e. the unity and continuity of individual existence, was the only point of importance. He holds the same «Aristotelian» conception of the unique and intimate connection of the individual soul and body.

The very idea of the uniqueness is radically modified in Christian philosophy as compared with the pre-Christian Greek. In Greek philosophy it was a «sculptural» uniqueness, an invariable crystallization of a frozen image. In Christian experience it is the uniqueness of the life once experienced and lived. In the one case it was a timeless identity, in the other it is a uniqueness in time. The whole conception of time is different in the two cases.

Greek philosophy did not know and was in no way prepared to admit any passage from time into eternity, the temporal seemed to be eo ipso transitory. That which is happening can never become everlasting. What is born must inevitably die. Only what is unborn or unoriginated can persist. Everything that had a beginning will have an end. Only that which had no beginning can be permanent, or «eternal.» Therefore, for a Greek philosopher to admit future immortality meant at once to presuppose an eternal pre-existence. Thus the whole meaning of the historical process is a kind of descent from eternity into time. The destiny of man depends upon his innate germs rather than upon his creative achievements. For a Greek, time was simply a lower or reduced mode of existence. Strictly speaking, in time nothing is produced or achieved nor is there anything to be produced or achieved. The «eternal» and invariable realities are merely, as it were, «projected» into a lower sphere. In this sense Plato called time a «mobile image of eternity» (Timaeus 37d: εἰκὼν κινητὸν τινὰ αἰῶνος ποιῆσαι). Plato had in view astronomical time, i.e. the rotation of the heavens. No real progress is visualized. On the contrary, time «imitates» eternity and «rolls on according to the laws of number» (38a, b), just in order to become like the eternal as much as possible. Time is just this permanent reiteration of itself. The basic idea is reflection, not accomplishment.¹⁹² For everything which is worth existing really does exist in the most perfect manner before all time, in a static invariability of the timeless, and there is nothing to add to this perfected fulness.¹⁹³ Consequently, all that is happening is to be utterly transient. All is perfect and complete, and nothing to be perfected or completed. And therefore the burden of time, this rotation of beginnings and ends, is meaningless and tiresome. There is no sense of creative duty in the Greek mind. The impassibility or even indifference of the sage seem to be the climax of perfection. The sage is not concerned with or disturbed by all these vicissitudes of the temporal order. He knows that everything is happening according to eternal and inviolable laws or measures. He learns amid the tumult of events to contemplate the invariable and eternal harmony of the Cosmos. The ancient philosopher out of time dreams of eternity. He dreams of the escape from this world to another, immovable, impassive, and permanent. Hence the sense of fate which was so typical before Christ. It was a climax and a limit of ancient philosophy. The temporal perspective of ancient philosophy is for ever closed and limited. Yet the Cosmos is eternal, there will be no end of cosmic «revolutions.» The Cosmos is a periodical being, like a clock. The highest symbol of life is a recurrent circle. As Aristotle put it, «the circle is a perfect thing,» and the circle only, not any straight line.¹⁹⁴ This also explains the common saying that human affairs form a circle, and that there is a circle in all other things that have a natural movement, both coming into being and passing away. This is because all other things are discriminated by time, and end and begin as though conforming to a cycle; for even time itself is thought to be a circle.»¹⁹⁵ The whole conception is obviously based on astronomical experience. Indeed, celestial movements are periodical and recurrent. The whole course of rotation is accomplished in a certain period [the «Great Year,» μέγας ἐνιαυτός]. And then comes a repetition, a new circle or cycle. There is no continuous progress in time, but rather «eternal returns,» a cyclophoria.¹⁹⁶ The Pythagoreans seem to have been the first to profess clearly an exact repetition. Eudemus refers to this Pythagorean conception. «If we are to believe the Pythagoreans, then in a certain time I shall again be reading to you, with the same rod in my hands, and all of you, even as at this moment, will be sitting in front of me, and in the same way everything less will come again.»¹⁹⁷ With Aristotle this periodical conception of the Universe took a strict scientific shape and was elaborated into a coherent system of Physics.¹⁹⁸ Later this idea of periodical returns was again taken up by the Stoics.

The early Stoics professed a periodical dissolution (ἐκπύρωσις) and palingenesis of all things, and then every minute detail will be exactly reproduced. There will be again a Socrates, the son of Sophroniscos and Phenareti, and he will be married to a Xanthippe, and will be again betrayed by an Anytus and a Meletes.¹⁹⁹ The same idea we find in Cleanthes and Chrysippus, in Poseidonius and Marcus Aurelius and all the others. This return was what the Stoics called the «'universal restoration,» an ἀποκατάστασις των πάντων. And it was obviously an astronomical term.²⁰⁰ There will be certainly some difference, but obviously no progress whatever. And on a circle all positions are indeed relative. It is a kind of a cosmic perpetuum mobile. All individual existences are hopelessly involved in this perpetual cosmic rotation, in these cosmic rhythms and «astral courses» [this was precisely what the Greeks used to call «destiny» and «fate,» ἡ εἰμαρμένη; vis positionis astrorum]. It is to be kept in mind that this exact repetition of worlds does not imply necessarily any continuity of individual existences, any survival or perseverance of the individuals, any individual immortality. The Universe itself is always numerically the same, and its laws are immutable and invariable, and each next world will exactly resemble the previous one in all particulars. But, strictly speaking, no individual survival is required for that. The same causes will inevitably produce the same effects. Nothing really new can ever happen. There is a continuity in the Cosmos, but hardly any true continuity of individuals.

Such was at least the view of Aristotle and the Aristotelians, and of some Stoics.²⁰¹ This periodical idea was kept by the Neoplatonists as well.²⁰² It was a miserable caricature of the resurrection. The permanence of these rotations, this nightmare of invariable cosmic predestination, a real imprisonment of every being, make this theory dull and frightening. There is no real history. «Cyclic motion and the transmigration of souls is not history,» remarks Lossev wittily. «It was a history built up on the pattern of astronomy, it was indeed itself a kind of astronomy.»²⁰³ The very feeling or apprehension of time is radically changed in Christianity. Time begins and ends, but in time human destiny is accomplished. Time itself is essentially unique, and never comes back. And the General Resurrection is the final limit of this unique time, of this unique destiny of the whole creation. In Greek philosophy a cycle was the symbol of time, or rotation. In Christian philosophy time is symbolized rather by a line, a beam, or an arrow. But the difference is deeper still. From a Christian point of view, time is neither an infinite rotation, nor an infinite progression, which never reaches its goal [»die schlechte Unendlichkeit« in Hegelian terminology, or ἄπειρον of the Greek philosophers]. Time is not merely a sequence of moments, nor is it an abstract form of multiplicity. Time is vectorial and finite. The temporal order is organized from within. The concreteness of purpose binds, from within, the stream of events into an organic whole. Events are precisely events, and not merely passing happenings. The temporal order is not the realm of privation, as it was for the Greek mind. It is more than just a stream. It is a creative process, in which what was brought to existence from nothingness, by the Divine will, is ascending towards its ultimate consummation, when the Divine purpose will be fulfilled, on the last day.²⁰⁴ And the center of history is the Incarnation and the victory of the Incarnate Lord over death and sin. St. Augustine pointed out this change, which has been brought about by Christianity, in this admirable phrase: «Viam rectam sequentes, quae nobis est Christus, eo duce et salvatore, a vano et inepto imporium circuitu iter fidem mentemque аvertamus."²⁰⁵ St. Gregory of Nyssa describes the vectoriality of history in this way. «When mankind attains to its fullness, then, without fail, this flowing motion of nature will cease, having reached its necessary ends; and this life will be replaced by another mode of existence, distinct from the present, which consists in birth and destruction. When our nature, in due order, fulfils the course of time, then, without fail, this flowing motion, created by the succession of generations, will come to an end. The filling of the Universe will make any further advance or increase impossible, and then the whole plenitude of souls will return from the dispersed and formless state to an assembled one, and the very elements will be reunited in the self-same combination.»²⁰⁶ This end and this goal is the General Resurrection. St. Gregory speaks of inner fulfilment of history. Time will come to an end. For sooner or later things will be accomplished. Seeds will mature and shoot forth. The resurrection of the dead is the one and unique destiny of the whole world, of the whole Cosmos, One for all and each, an universal and catholic balance. There is nothing naturalistic about this conception. The power of God will raise the dead. It will be the new and final revelation of God, of the Divine might and glory. The General Resurrection is the consummation of the Resurrection of Our Lord, the consummation of His victory over death and corruption. And beyond historical time there will be the future Kingdom, «the life of the age to come.» We are still in via, in the age of hope and expectation. Even the Saints in heaven still «await the resurrection of the dead.» The ultimate consummation will come for the whole human race at once.²⁰⁷ Then, at the close, for the whole creation the «Blessed Sabbath,» that very «day of rest,» the mysterious «Seventh day of creation,» will be inaugurated for ever. The expected is as yet inconceivable. «It is not yet made manifest what we shall be» [1 John 3:2]. But the pledge is given. Christ is risen.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews the redeeming work of Our Lord is depicted as the ministry of the High Priest. Christ comes into the world to accomplish the Will of God. Through the eternal Spirit He offers His own self to God, offers His blood for the remission of human sins, and this He accomplishes through the Passion. By His blood, as the blood of the New Testament, of the New Covenant, He enters heaven and enters within the very Holy of Holies, behind the veil. After the suffering of death He is crowned with glory and honor, and sits on the right hand of God the Father for ever. The sacrificial offering begins on earth and is consummated in heaven, where Christ presented and is still presenting us to God, as the eternal High Priest – «High Priest of the good things to come» (ἀρχιερεὺς των μελλόντων ἀγαθῶν) as the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, as the minister of the true tabernacle and sanctuary of God. In brief, as the Mediator of the New Covenant. Through the death of Christ is revealed Life Everlasting, «the powers of the age to come» are disclosed and shown forth (δυνάμεις τε μέλλοντος αἰῶνος). In the blood of Jesus is revealed the new and living way, the way into that eternal Sabbath, when God rests from His mighty deeds.

Thus the death of the Cross is a sacrificial offering. And to offer a sacrifice does not mean only to surrender. Even from a merely moral point of view, the whole significance of sacrifice is not the denial itself, but the sacrificial power of love. The sacrifice is not merely an offering, but rather a dedication, a consecration to God. The effective power of sacrifice is love [1Cor. 13:3]. But the offering of the sacrifice is more than the evidence of love, it is also a sacramental action, a liturgical office, or even a mystery. The offering of the sacrifice of the Cross is the sacrifice of love indeed, «as Christ also hath loved us, and given Himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour» [Ephes. 5:2]. But this love was not only sympathy or compassion and mercy towards the fallen and heavy-laden. Christ gives Himself not only «for the remission of sins,» but also for our glorification. He gives Himself not only for sinful humanity, but also for the Church: to cleanse and to hallow her, to make her holy, glorious and spotless [Ephes. 5:25]. The power of a sacrificial offering is in its cleansing and hallowing effect. And the power of the sacrifice of the Cross is that the Cross is the path of glory. On the Cross the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in Him [John 13:31]. Here is the fulness of the sacrifice. «Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?» [Luke 24:26].

The death of the Cross was effective, not as a death of an Innocent One, but as the death of the Incarnate Lord. «We needed an Incarnate God; God put to death, that we might live» – to use a bold phrase of St. Gregory of Nazianzus.²⁰⁸ This is the «dreadful and most glorious mystery» of the Cross. On Golgotha the Incarnate Lord celebrates the Holy Service, in ara crucis, and offers in sacrifice His own human nature, which from its conception «in the Virgin’s womb» was assumed into the indivisible unity of His Hypostasis, and in this assumption was restored to all its original sinlessness and purity. In Christ there is no human hypostasis. His personality is Divine, yet incarnate. There is the all-complete fulness of human nature, «the whole human nature,» and therefore Christ is the «perfect man,» as the Council of Chalcedon said. But there was no human hypostasis. And consequently on the Cross it was not a man that died. «For He who suffered was not common man, but God made man, fighting the contest of endurance,» says St. Cyril of Jerusalem.²⁰⁹ It may be properly said that God dies on the Cross, but in His own humanity. «He who dwelleth in the highest is reckoned among the dead and in the little grave findeth lodging.²¹⁰ This is the voluntary death of One who is Himself Life Eternal, who is in very truth the Resurrection and the Life. A human death indeed but obviously death within the hypostasis of the Word, the Incarnate Word. And thence a resurrecting death.

«I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!» [Luke 12:49–50]. Fire – the Holy Spirit – descending from on high in fiery tongues in the «dreadful and unsearchable mystery of Pentecost.» This was baptism by the Spirit. And Baptism, this is the death on the Cross itself and the shedding of blood, «the baptism of martyrdom and blood, with which Christ Himself also was baptized,» as St. Gregory of Nazianzus suggested.²¹¹ The death on the Cross as a baptism by blood is the very essence of the redeeming mystery of the Cross. Baptism is a cleansing. And the Baptism of the Cross is, as it were, the cleansing of human nature, which is travelling the path of restoration in the Hypostasis of the Incarnate Word. This is a washing of human nature in the outpoured sacrificial blood of the Divine Lamb. And first of all, a washing of the body: not only a washing away of sins, but a washing away of human infirmities and of mortality itself. It is the cleansing in preparation for the coming resurrection: a cleansing of all human nature, of all humanity in the person of its new and mystical First-born, in the «Second Adam.» This is the baptism by blood of the whole Church. «Thou hast purchased Thy Church by the power of Thy Cross.» And the whole Body ought to be and must be baptized with the baptism of the Cross. «The cup that I drink, you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized» [Mark 10:39; Matthew 20:23].²¹²

Further, the death of the Cross is the cleansing of the whole world. It is the baptism by blood of all creation, the cleansing of the Cosmos through the cleansing of the Microcosm. «A purification not for a small part of man’s world, not for a short time, but for the whole Universe and through eternity,» to quote St. Gregory of Nazianzus again.²¹³ Therefore all creation mysteriously partakes in the mortal Passion of the Incarnate Master and Lord. «All creation changed its face in terror when it beheld Thee hanging on the Cross, О Christ… The sun was darkened and of earth the foundations were shaken: All things suffered in sympathy with Thee, Who hadst created all things.»²¹⁴ This was not co-suffering of compassion or pity, but rather co-suffering of awe and trembling. «The foundations of the earth were set in trembling by the terror of Thy might,» co-suffering in the joyous apprehension of the great mystery of the resurrecting death. «For by the blood of Thy Son is the earth blessed.» «Many indeed are the miracles of that time,» said St. Gregory the Nazianzus, «God crucified, the sun darkened and rekindled again; for it was fitting that with the Creator the creatures should co-suffer. The veil rent in twain. Blood and water shed from His side, blood because He was man, and water because He was higher than man. The earth quaked, rocks were rent for the sake of the Rock. The dead rose up for a pledge of the final and general resurrection. The miracles before the grave and at the grave – who will worthily sing? But none is like the miracle of my salvation. A few drops of blood recreate the whole world and become to us what rennet is to milk, binding us together and compressing us in unity.»²¹⁵

The death of the Cross is a sacrament, it has not only a moral, but also a sacramental and liturgical meaning. It is the Passover of the New Testament. And its sacramental significance is revealed at the Last Supper. It may seem rather strange that the Eucharist should precede Calvary, and that in the Upper Room the Saviour Himself should give His Body and His Blood to the disciples. «This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you» [Luke 22:20]. However, the Last Supper was not merely a prophetic rite, just as the Eucharist is no mere symbolic remembrance. It is a true sacrament. For Christ who performs both is the High Priest of the New Testament. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Crucifixion, the broken Body and the Blood outpoured. And along with this it is also the sacrament of the transfiguration, the mysterious and sacramental «conversion» of the flesh into the glorious spiritual food (μεταϐολή). The broken Body, dying, yet, in death itself, rising again. For the Lord went voluntarily to the Cross, the Cross of shame and glory. St. Gregory of Nyssa gives the following explanation. «Christ does not wait for the constraint of treachery, nor does He await the thieving attack of the Jews, or the lawless judgment of Pilate, that their evil might be the fount and source of the general salvation of men. Of His own economy He anticipates their transgressions by means of a hierurgic rite, ineffable and unusual. He brings His own Self as an offering and sacrifice for us, being at once the Priest and the Lamb of God, that «taketh» the sins of the world. By offering His Body as food, He clearly showed that the sacrificial offering of the Lamb had already been accomplished. For the sacrificial body would not have been suitable for food if it were still animated. And so, when He gave the disciples the Body to eat and the Blood to drink, then by free will and the power of the sacrament His Body had already ineffably and invisibly been offered in sacrifice, and His soul, together with the Divine power united with it, was in those places whither the power of Him who so ordained transported it.»²¹⁶ In other words, the voluntary separation of the soul from the body, the sacramental agony, so to say, of the Incarnate, was, as it were, already begun. And the Blood, freely shed in the salvation of all, becomes a «medicine of incorruption,» a medicine of immortality and life.²¹⁷

The Lord died on the Cross. This was a true death. Yet not wholly like ours, simply because this was the death of the Lord, the death of the Incarnate Word, death within the indivisible Hypostasis of the Word made man. And again, it was a voluntary death, since in the undefiled human nature, free from original sin, which was assumed by the Word in the Incarnation, there was no inherent necessity of death. And the free «taking up» by the Lord of the sin of the world did not constitute for Him any ultimate necessity to die. Death was accepted only by the desire of the redeeming Love. His death was not the «wages of sin.»²¹⁸ And the main point is that this was a death within the Hypostasis of the Word, the death of the «enhypostasized» humanity. Death in general is a separation, and in the death of the Lord His most precious body and soul were separated indeed. But the one hypostasis of the Word Incarnate was not divided, the «Hypostatic union» was not broken or destroyed. In other words, though separated in death, the soul and the body remained still united through the Divinity of the Word, from which neither was ever estranged. This does not alter the ontological character of death, but changes its meaning. This was an «incorrupt death,» and therefore corruption and death were overcome in it, and in it begins the resurrection. The very death of the Incarnate reveals the resurrection of human nature. And the Cross is manifested to be life-giving, the new tree of life, «by which the lamentation of death has been consumed.»²¹⁹ The Church bears witness to this on Good Saturday with special emphasis.

«Although Christ died as man, and His holy soul was separated from His most pure body,» says St. John Damascene, «His Divinity remained both with the soul and the body, continued inseparable from either. And thus the one hypostasis was not divided into two hypostases, for from the beginning both body and soul had their being with the hypostasis of the Word. Although at the hour of death body and soul were separated from each other, yet each of them was preserved, having the one hypostasis of the Word. Therefore the one hypostasis of the Word was also the hypostasis of the body and of the soul. For neither the body nor the soul ever received any proper hypostasis, other than that of the Word. The Hypostasis then of the Word is ever one, and there were never two hypostases of the Word. Accordingly the Hypostasis of Christ is ever one. And though the soul is separated from the body in space, yet they remain hypostatically united through the Word.»²²⁰

There are two aspects of the mystery of the Cross. It is at once a mystery of sorrow and a mystery of joy, a mystery of shame and of glory. It is a mystery of sorrow and mortal anguish, a mystery of desertion, of humiliation and shame. «Today the Master of Creation and the Lord of Glory is nailed upon the Cross… is beaten upon the shoulders, and receives spittings and wounds, indignities and buffetings in the face.»²²¹ The God-man languishes and suffers at Gethsemane and on Calvary until the mystery of death is accomplished. Before Him are revealed all the hatred and blindness of the world, all the obstinacy and foolishness of evil, the coldness of hearts, all the helplessness and pettiness of the disciples, all the «righteousness» of human pseudo-freedom. And He covers everything with His all-forgiving, sorrowful, compassionate and co-suffering love, and prays for those who crucify Him, for verily they do not know what they are doing. «Ό my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied thee?» [Micah 6:3, paraphrased and applied to Our Lord in the Office of Good Friday, Matins, Antiphon XII, Troparion]. The salvation of the world is accomplished in these sufferings and sorrows, «by His stripes we are healed» [Is. 53:5]. And the Church guards us against every docetic underestimate of the reality and fulness of these sufferings «ἵνα μὴ κενωϑῇ ὁ σταυρὸς του Χριστοῦ» [1Cor. 1:17]. Yet the Church guards us also against the opposite exaggeration, against all kenotic overemphasis. For the day of the shameful Crucifixion, when Our Lord was numbered among the thieves, is the day of glory. «Today we keep the feast, for Our Lord is nailed upon the Cross,» in the sharp phrase of St. John Chrysostome.²²² And the tree of the Cross is an «ever-glorious tree,» the very Tree of Life, «by which corruption is destroyed,» «by which the lamentation of death is abolished.» The Cross is the «seal of salvation,» a sign of power and victory. Not just a symbol, but the very power of salvation, «the foundation of salvation,» as Chrysostom says – ὑπόϑεσος της σωτηρίας. The Cross is the sign of the Kingdom. «I call Him King, because I see Him crucified, for it is appropriate for a King to die for His subjects.» This again is St. John Chrysostom. The Church keeps the days of the Cross and cherishes them as solemnities – not only as a triumph of humility and love, but also as a victory of immortality and life. «As the life of the creation does the Church greet Thy Cross, O Lord.»²²³ For the death of Christ is itself the victory over death, the destruction of death, the abolition of mortality and corruption, «Thou diest and quickenest me.» And the death of the Cross is a victory over death not only because it was followed or crowned by the Resurrection. The Resurrection only reveals and sets forth the victory achieved on the Cross. The Resurrection is accomplished in the very falling asleep of the God-man. And the power of the Resurrection is precisely the «power of the Cross,» «the unconquerable and indestructible and Divine power of the honorable and life-giving Cross,»²²⁴ the power of the voluntary Passion and death of the God-man. As St. Gregory of Nazianzus puts it: «He lays down His life, but He has power to take it again; and the veil is rent, for the mysterious doors of Heaven are opened; the rocks are cleft, the dead rise… He dies, but He gives life, and by His death destroys death. He is buried, but He rises again. He goes down into Hell, but He brings up the souls.»²²⁵ On the Cross the Lord «restores us to original blessedness,» and «by the Cross comes joy to the whole world.» On the Cross the Lord not only suffers and languishes, but rests, «having fallen asleep, as Thou wert dead.»²²⁶ And He gives rest to man too, restores and renews him, «and resting on the tree, Thou hast given me rest, one who was overburdened with the burden of sins.» From the Cross Christ sheds immortality upon men. By his burial in the grave He opens the gates of death, and renews corrupted human nature. «Every action and every miracle of Christ are most divine and marvellous,» says St. John Damascene, «but the most marvellous of all is His honorable Cross. For no other thing has subdued death, expiated the sin of the first parents, despoiled Hades, bestowed the resurrection, granted power to us of condemning death itself, prepared the return to original blessedness, opened the gates of Paradise, given our nature a seat at the right hand of God, and made us the children of God, save the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The death of Christ on the Cross clothed us with the hypostatic Wisdom and Power of God.»²²⁷ The mystery of the resurrecting Cross is commemorated especially on Good Saturday. As it is explained in the Synaxarion of that day, «on Great and Holy Saturday do we celebrate the divine-bodily burial of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His descent into Hell, by which being called from corruption, our race passed to life eternal.» This is not only the eve of salvation. It is the very day of our salvation. «This is the blessed Sabbath, this is the day of rest, whereon the Only Begotten Son of God has rested from all His deeds.»²²⁸ This is the day of the Descent into Hell. And the Descent into Hell is already the Resurrection.²²⁹

The great «three days of death» (triduum mortis) are the mysterious sacramental days of the Resurrection. In His flesh the Lord is resting in the grave, and His flesh is not abandoned by His Divinity. «Though Thy Temple was destroyed in the hour of the Passion, yet even then one was the Hypostasis of Thy Divinity and Thy flesh.»²³⁰ The Lord’s flesh does not suffer corruption, it remains incorruptible even in death itself, i.e. alive, as though it had never died, for it abides in the very bosom of Life, in the Hypostasis of the Word. As it is phrased in one of the hymns, «Thou hast tasted of death, but hast not known corruption.»²³¹ St. John Damascene suggested that the word «corruption» (ϕθορά) has a double meaning. First, it means «all passive states of man» (τὰ πάϑη) such as hunger, thirst, weariness, the nailing, death itself – that is, the separation of soul and body. In this sense we say that the Lord’s body was liable to corruption (ϕϑαρτόν) until the Resurrection. But corruption also means the complete decomposition of the body and its destruction. This is corruption in the proper sense – or rather «destruction» (διαϕϑορά) – but the body of the Lord did not experience this mode of corruption at all, it remained even in death «incorrupt.» That is to say, it never became a corpse.²³² And in this incorruption the Body has been transfigured into a state of glory. The soul of Christ descends into Hell, also unseparated from the Divinity, «even in Hell in the soul, as God,» – the «deified soul» of Christ, as St. John of Damascus suggests, ψυχὴ τεϑεωμένη.²³³

This descent into Hell means first of all the entry or penetration into the realm of death, into the realm of mortality and corruption. And in this sense it is simply a synonym of death itself.²³⁴ It is hardly possible to identify that Hell, or Hades, or the «subterranean abodes» to which the Lord descended, with the «hell» of sufferings for the sinners and the wicked. In all its objective reality the hell of sufferings and torments is certainly a spiritual mode of existence, determined by the personal character of each soul. And it is not only something to come, but to a great extent is already constituted for an obstinate sinner by the very fact of his perversion and apostasy. The wicked are actually in hell, in darkness and desolation. In any case one cannot imagine that the souls of the unrepentant sinners, and the Prophets of the Old Dispensation, who spake by the Holy Spirit and preached the coming Messiah, and St. John the Baptist himself, were in the same «hell.» Our Lord descended into the darkness of death. Hell, or Hades, is just the darkness and shadow of death, rather a place of mortal anguish than a place of penal torments, a dark «sheol,» a place of hopeless disembodiment and disincarnation, which was only scantily and dimly fore-illuminated by the slanting rays of the not-yet-risen Sun, by the hope and expectation yet unfulfilled. Because of the Fall and Original Sin, all mankind fell into mortality and corruption. And even the highest righteousness under the Law could save man neither from the inevitability of empirical death, nor that helplessness and powerlessness beyond the grave, which depended upon the impossibility of a natural resurrection, upon the lack of power to restore the broken wholeness of human existence. That was, as it were, a kind of ontological infirmity of the soul, which, in the separation of death, had lost the faculty of being the true «entelechia» of its own body, the helplessness of fallen and wounded nature. And in this sense, all descended «into hell,» into infernal darkness, as it were, into the very Kingdom of Satan, the prince of death and the spirit of negation; and they were all under his power, though the righteous ones did not partake of evil or demoniac perversion, since they were confined in death by the grip of ontological powerlessness, not because of their personal perversion. They were really the «spirits in prison.»²³⁵ And it was into this prison, into this Hell, that the Lord and Saviour descended. Amid the darkness of pale death shines the unquenchable light of Life, and Life Divine. This destroys Hell and destroys mortality. «Though Thou didst descend into the grave, О Merciful One, yet didst Thou destroy the power of Hell.»²³⁶ In this sense Hell has been simply abolished, «and there is not one dead in the grave.» For «he received earth, and yet met heaven.» Death is overcome by Life. «When Thou didst descend into death, О Life Eternal, then Thou didst slay Hell by the flash of Thy Divinity.»²³⁷

The descent of Christ into Hell is the manifestation of Life amid the hopelessness of death, it is victory over death. And by no means is it the «taking upon» Himself by Christ of the «hellish torments of God-forsakenness.»²³⁸ The Lord descended into Hell as the Victor, Christus Victor, as the Master of Life. He descended in His glory, not in humiliation, although through humiliation. But even death He assumed voluntarily and with authority. «It was not from any natural weakness of the Word that dwelt in it that the body had died, but in order that in it death might be done away by the power of the Saviour,» says St. Athanasius.²³⁹ The Lord descended into Hell to announce the good tidings and to preach to those souls who were held and imprisoned there [1 Peter 3:19: ἐν ᾧ καὶ τοῖς ἐν ϕυλακῇ πνεύμασιν πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν and 4:6: νεκροῖς εὐηγγελίσθη], by the power of His appearance and preaching, to set them free, to show them their deliverance.²⁴⁰ In other words, the descent into Hell is the resurrection of the «whole Adam.» Since «Hell groans below» and «is afflicted,» by His descent Christ «shatters the bonds eternal,» and raises the whole human race.²⁴¹ He destroys death itself, «the hold of death is broken and the power of Satan is destroyed.»²⁴² This is the triumph of the Resurrection. «And the iron gates didst Thou crush, and Thou didst lead us out of darkness and the shadow of death, and our chains didst Thou break.»²⁴³ «And Thou hast laid waste the abode of death by Thy death today and illuminated everything by Thy light of the Resurrection.» Thus Death itself is transmuted into Resurrection. «I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen. And I have the keys of death and of Hades» [Rev. 1:17–18].

In the death of the Saviour the powerlessness of death over Him was revealed. In the fulness of His human nature Our Lord was mortal, since even in the original and spotless human nature a «potentia mortis» was inherent. The Lord was killed and died. But death did not hold Him. «It was not possible for him to be held by it [Acts 2:24]. St. John Chrysostom commented: «He Himself permitted it… Death itself in holding Him had pangs as in travail, and was sore bested… and He so rose as never to die.»²⁴⁴ He is Life Everlasting, and by the very fact of His death He destroys death. His very descent into Hell, into the realm of death, is the mighty manifestation of Life. By the descent into Hell He quickens death itself. By the Resurrection the powerlessness of death is manifested. The soul of Christ, separated in death, filled with Divine power, is again united with its body, which remained incorruptible throughout the mortal separation, in which it did not suffer any physical decomposition. In the death of the Lord it is manifest that His most pure body was not susceptible to corruption, that it was free from that mortality into which the original human nature had been involved through sin and Fall.

In the first Adam the inherent potentiality of death by disobedience was disclosed and actualized. In the second Adam the potentiality of immortality by purity and obedience was sublimated and actualized into the impossibility of death. «For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive» [1Cor. 15:22]. The whole fabric of human nature in Christ proved to be stable and strong. The disembodiment of the soul was not consummated into a rupture. Even in the common death of man, as St. Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, the separation of soul and body is never absolute; a certain connection is still there. In the death of Christ this connection proved to be not only a «connection of knowledge»; His soul never ceased to be the «vital power» of the body. Thus His death in all its reality, as a true separation and disembodiment, was like a sleep. «Then was man’s death shown to be but a sleep,» as St. John Damascene says.²⁴⁵ The reality of death is not yet abolished, but its powerlessness is revealed. The Lord really and truly died. But in His death in an eminent measure the «dynamis of the resurrection» was manifest, which is latent but inherent in every death. To His death the glorious simile of the kernel of wheat can be applied to its full extent. [John 12:24]. And in His death the glory of God is manifest. «I have both glorified it and will glorify again» [v.28]. In the body of the Incarnate One      this interim between death and resurrection is fore-shortened. «It is sown in dishonor: it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness: it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body: it is raised a spiritual body» [1 Cor. 15:43–44]. In the death of the Incarnate One this mysterious growth of the seed was accomplished in three days – «triduum mortis."

«He suffered not the temple of His body to remain long dead, but just having shown it dead by the contact of death, straightway raised it on the third day, and raised with it also the sign of victory over death, that is, the incorruption and impassibility manifested in the body.» In these words St. Athanasius brings forward the victorious and resurrecting character of the death of Christ.²⁴⁶ In this mysterious «triduum mortis,» the body of Our Lord has been transfigured into a body of glory, and has been clothed in power and light. The seed matures. The      Lord rises from the dead, as a Bridegroom comes      forth from the chamber. This was accomplished by the power of God, as the general resurrection will, in the last day, be accomplished by the power of God. And in the Resurrection the Incarnation is completed, a victorious manifestation of Life within human nature, a grafting of immortality into the human composition.

The Resurrection of Christ was a victory, not over his death only, but over death in general. «We celebrate the death of Death, the downfall of Hell, and the beginning of a life new and everlasting.»²⁴⁷ In His Resurrection the whole of humanity, all human nature, is co-resurrected with Christ, «the human race is clothed in incorruption.»²⁴⁸ Co-resurrected not indeed in the sense that all are raised from the grave. Men do still die; but the hopelessness of dying is abolished. Death is rendered powerless, and to all human nature is given the power or «potentia» of resurrection. St. Paul made this quite clear: «But if there be no resurrection of dead, then is Christ not risen… For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised» [1Cor. 15:13,16]. St. Paul meant to say that the Resurrection of Christ would become meaningless if it were not a universal accomplishment, if the whole Body were not implicitly «pre-resurrected» with the Head. And faith in Christ itself would lose any sense and become empty and vain; there would be nothing to believe in. «And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain» [v. 17]. Apart from the hope of the General Resurrection, belief in Christ would be in vain and to no purpose; it would only be vainglory. «But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept» [1Cor. 15:20]. And in this lies the victory of life.²⁴⁹ «It is true, we still die as before,» says St. John Chrysostom, «but we do not remain in death; and this is not to die... The power and very reality of death is just this, that a dead man has no possibility of returning to life… But if after death he is to be quickened and moreover to be given a better life, then this is no longer death, but a falling asleep.»²⁵⁰ The same conception is found in St. Athanasius. The «condemnation of death» is abolished. «Corruption ceasing and being put away by the grace of Resurrection, we are henceforth dissolved for a time only, according to our bodies’ mortal nature; like seeds cast into the earth, we do not perish, but sown in the earth we shall rise again, death being brought to nought by the grace of the Saviour.»²⁵¹ This was a healing and a renewing of nature, and therefore there is here a certain compulsion; all will rise, and all will be restored to the fulness of their natural being, yet transformed. From henceforth every disembodiment is but temporary. The dark vale of Hades is abolished by the power of the life-giving Cross.

St. Gregory of Nyssa strongly emphasizes the organic interdependence between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The Resurrection is not only a consequence, but a fruit of the death on the Cross. St. Gregory stresses two points especially: the unity of the Divine Hypostasis, in which the soul and body of Christ are linked together even in their mortal separation; and the utter sinlessness of the Lord. And he proceeds: «'When our nature, following its proper course, had even in Him been advanced to the separation of soul and body, He knitted together again the disconnected elements, cementing them together, as it were, with a cement of His Divine power, and recombining what was severed in a union never to be broken. And this is the Resurrection, namely the return, after they have been dissolved, of those elements that have been before linked together, into an indissoluble union through a mutual incorporation; in order that thus the primal grace which invested humanity might be recalled, and we restored to everlasting life, when the vice that had been mixed up with our kind has evaporated through our dissolution… For as the principle of death took its rise in one person and passed on in succession through the whole of human kind, in like manner the principle of the Resurrection extends from one person to the whole of humanity… For when, in that concrete humanity which He had taken to Himself, the soul after the dissolution returned to the body, then this uniting of the several portions passes, as by a new principle, in equal force upon the whole human race. This then is the mystery of God’s plan with regard to His death and His resurrection from the dead.»²⁵² In another place St. Gregory explains his meaning by the analogy of the broken reed, cloven in twain. Whoever puts the broken parts together, starting from any one end, then also, of necessity, puts together the other end, «and the whole broken reed is completely rejointed.» Thus then in Christ the union of soul and body, again restored, brings to reunion «the whole human nature, divided by death into two parts,» since the hope of resurrection establishes the connection between the separated parts. In Adam our nature was split or dissected into two through sin. Yet in Christ this split is healed completely. This then is the abolition of death, or rather of mortality. In other words, it is the potential and dynamic restoration of the fulness and wholeness of human existence. It is a recreation of the whole human race, a «new creation» (ἡ καινὴ κτίσις),²⁵³ a new revelation of Divine love and Divine power, the consummation of creation.

One has to distinguish most carefully between the healing of nature and the healing of the will. Nature is healed and restored with a certain compulsion, by the mighty power of God’s omnipotent and invincible grace. One may even say, by some «violence of grace.» The wholeness is in a way forced upon human nature. For in Christ all human nature (the «seed of Adam») is fully and completely cured from unwholeness and mortality. This restoration will be actualized and revealed to its full extent in the General Resurrection, the resurrection of all, both of the righteous and of the wicked. No one, so far as nature is concerned, can escape Christ’s kingly rule, can alienate himself from the invincible power of the resurrection. But the will of man cannot be cured in the same invincible manner; for the whole meaning of the healing of the will is in its free conversion. The will of man must turn itself to God; there must be a free and spontaneous response of love and adoration. The will of man can be healed only in freedom, in the «mystery of freedom.» Only by this spontaneous and free effort does man enter into that new and eternal life which is revealed in Christ Jesus. A spiritual regeneration can be wrought only in perfect freedom, in an obedience of love, by a self-consecration and self-dedication to God. This distinction was stressed with great insistence in the remarkable treatise by Nicolas Cabasilas on The Life in Christ. Resurrection is a «rectification of nature» (ἡ ἀνάστασις ϕύσεως ἐστιν ἐπανόρθωσις) and this God grants freely. But the Kingdom of Heaven, and the beatific vision, and union with Christ, presume the desire (τρυϕή ἐστιν της θελήσεως), and therefore are available only for those who have longed for them, and loved, and desired. Immortality will be given to all, just as all can enjoy the Divine providence. It does not depend upon our will whether we shall rise after death or not, just as it is not by our will that we are born. Christ’s death and resurrection brings immortality and incorruption to all in the same manner, because all have the same nature as the Man Christ Jesus. But nobody can be compelled to desire. Thus Resurrection is a gift common to all, but blessedness will be given only to some.²⁵⁴ And again, the path of life is the path of renunciation, of mortification, of self-sacrifice and self-oblation. One has to die to oneself in order to live in Christ. Each one must personally and freely associate himself with Christ, the Lord, the Saviour, and the Redeemer, in the confession of faith, in the choice of love, in the mystical oath of allegiance. Each One has to renounce himself, to «lose his soul» for Christ’s sake, to take up his cross, and to follow after Him. The Christian struggle is the «following» after Christ, following the path of His Passion and Cross, even unto death, but first of all, following in love. «Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren… Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins» [1 John 3:16; 4:10]. He who does not die with Christ cannot live with Him. «Unless of our own free choice we accept to die unto His passion, His life is not in us,» says St. Ignatius.²⁵⁵ This is no mere ascetical or moral rule, not merely a discipline. This is the ontological law of spiritual existence, even the law of life itself.

The Christian life is initiated with a new birth, by water and the Spirit. First, repentance is required, «ἡ μετάνοια,» an inner change, intimate and resolute.

The symbolism of Holy Baptism is complex and manifold. Baptism must be performed in the name of the Holy Trinity; and the Trinitarian invocation is unanimously regarded as the most necessary condition of the validity and efficacy of the sacrament. Yet above all, baptism is the putting on of Christ [Gal. 3:27], and an incorporation into His Body [1Cor. 12:13]. The Trinitarian invocation is required because outside the Trinitarian faith it is impossible to know Christ, to recognize in Jesus the Incarnate Lord, «One of the Holy Trinity.» The symbolism of baptism is above all a symbolism of death and resurrection, of Christ’s death and resurrection. «Know ye not, that as many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life» [Rom. 6:3–4]. It can be said that baptism is a sacramental resurrection in Christ, a rising up with Him and in Him to a new and eternal life: «Buried with Him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him from the dead» [Col. 2:12] – συνταϕέντες αὐτῶ ἐν τω ϐαπτίσματι, ἐν φ καὶ συνηγέρϑητε διὰ της πίστεως της ἐνεργείας του Θεοῦ του ἐγείραντος αὐτὸν ἐκ νεκρῶν. Co-resurrected with Him precisely through burial: «for if we be dead with Him, we shall also live with Him» [2Tim. 2:11]. For in baptism the believer becomes a member of Christ, grafted into His Body, «rooted and built up in Him» [Col. 2:7]. Thereby the grace of the Resurrection is shed abroad on all. Before it is consummated in the General Resurrection, Life Eternal is manifested in the spiritual rebirth of believers, granted and accomplished in baptism, and the union with the Risen Lord is the initiation of the resurrection and of the Life to come. «But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord… Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus might also be made manifest in our body… Knowing that He which raised up the Lord Jesus shall also raise us by Jesus, and shall present us with you… For we know, that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven…, not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up by life» [2Cor. 3:18; 4:10,14; 5:1,2]. We are changed, not only will be changed. Baptismal regeneration and ascesis are joined together: the Death with Christ and resurrection are already operative within believers. The resurrection is operative not only as a return to life, but also as a lifting up or sublimation into the glory. This is not only a manifestation of the power and glory of God, but also a transfiguration of man, in so far as he is dying with Christ. In dying with Him, man also lives. All will rise, but only to the faithful believer is the resurrection to be a true «resurrection unto life.» He comes not into judgment, but passes from death to life [John 5:24–29; 8:51]. Only in communion with God and through life in Christ does the restoration of human wholeness gain meaning. To those in total darkness, who have deliberately confined themselves «outside God,» outside the Light Divine, the Resurrection itself must seem rather unnecessary and unmotivated. But it will come, as a «'resurrection to judgment» [John 5:29; εἰς ἀνάστασιν κρίσεως]. And in this will be completed the mystery and the tragedy of human freedom.

Here indeed we are on the threshold of the inconceivable and incomprehensible. The «apokatastasis» of nature does not abolish free will. The will must be moved from within by love. St. Gregory of Nyssa had a clear understanding of this. He anticipated a kind of universal «conversio» of souls in the after-life, when the Truth of God will be revealed and manifested with some compelling and ultimate evidence. Just at that point the limitations of the Hellenistic mind are obvious. Evidence to it seemed to be the decisive reason or motive for the will, as if «'sin» were merely «ignorance.»²⁵⁶ The Hellenistic mind had to pass through the long and hard experience of asceticism, of ascetic self-examination and self-control, in order to free itself from this intellectualistic naiveté and illusion, and discover a dark abyss in the fallen soul. Only in St. Maximus the Confessor, after some centuries of ascetic preparation, do we find a new, remodelled and deepened interpretation of the «apokatastasis.» All nature, the whole Cosmos, will be restituted. But the dead souls will still be insensitive to the very revelation of Light.

The Light Divine will shine to all, but those who have deliberately spent their lives here on earth in fleshly desires, «against nature,» will be unable to apprehend or enjoy this eternal bliss. The Light is the Word which illuminates the natural minds of the faithful; but to others it is a burning fire of the judgment (τη καύσει της κρίσεως). He punishes those who, through love of the flesh, cling to the nocturnal darkness of this life. St. Maximus admitted an «apokatastasis» in the sense of a restitution of all beings to an integrity of nature, of a universal manifestation of the Divine Life, which will be apprehended by every one; but it does not mean that all will equally participate in this revelation of the Good. St. Maximus draws a clear distinction between an ἐπίγνωσις and a μέϑεξις. The divine gifts are dispensed in proportion to the capacities of men. The fulness of natural powers will be restored in all, and God will be in all, indeed; but only in the Saints will He be present with grace διὰ τὴν χάριν. In the wicked He will be present without grace, νεκραν τὴν χάριν. No grace will be bestowed upon the wicked, because the ultimate union with God requires the determination of the will. The wicked will be separated from God by their lack of a resolute purpose of good. We have here the same duality of nature and will. In the resurrection the whole of creation will be restored. But sin and evil are rooted in the will. The Hellenistic mind concluded therefrom that evil is unstable and by itself must disappear inevitably. For nothing can be perpetual, unless it be rooted in a Divine decree. Evil cannot be but transitory. The Christian inference is the opposite indeed. There is some strange inertia and obstinacy of the will, and this obstinacy may remain uncured even in the universal restoration. God never does any violence to man, and the communion with God cannot be forced upon or imposed upon the obstinate. As St. Maximus puts it, «the Spirit does not produce an undesired resolve, but it transforms a chosen purpose into theоsis."²⁵⁷ For sin and evil come not from an external impurity, but from an internal failure, from the perversion of the will. Consequently, sin is overcome only by inner conversion and change, and repentance is sealed by grace in the sacraments.²⁵⁸

Physical death among mankind is not abrogated by the Resurrection of Christ. Death is rendered powerless, indeed; mortality is overcome by the hope and pledge of the coming resurrection. And yet each must justify that resurrection for himself. This can be done only in a free communion with the Lord. The immortality of nature, the permanence of existence, must be actualized into the life in the Spirit. The fulness of life is not merely an endless existence. In baptism we are initiated into this very resurrection of life, which will be consummated in the last day.

St. Paul speaks of a «likeness» unto the death of Christ, τω ὁμοιώματι του θανάτου αὐτοῦ [Rom. 6:5], but this «likeness» means more than a resemblance. It is more than a mere sign or recollection. The meaning of this «likeness» for St. Paul himself was that in each of us Christ can and must be «formed» [Gal. 4:19]. Christ is the Head, all believers are His members, and His life is actualized in them. All are called and every one is capable of believing, and of being quickened by faith and baptism to live in Him. Baptism is a regeneration, ἀναγέννησις, a new, spiritual, and charismatic birth. As Cabasilas says, Baptism is the cause of a beatific life in Christ, not merely of life.²⁵⁹ St. Cyril of Jerusalem lucidly explains the true reality of all baptismal symbolism. It is true, he says, that in the baptismal font we die and are buried only «in imitation,» only «symbolically» (διὰ συμϐόλου). We do not rise from a real grave (οὐδ’ ἀληθῶς ἐτάϕημεν) and yet, «if the imitation is in an image, the salvation is in very truth,» ἐν ἀληϑείᾳ δὲ ἡ σωτηρία. Christ was really crucified and buried, and actually rose from the grave. The Greek word used is ὄντως. It is more and stronger than simply ἀληϑῶς – «in very truth»; it emphasizes the supernatural character of the death and resurrection of Our Lord. Hence He gave us this chance, by «imitative» sharing of His Passion to acquire «salvation in reality» (τη μιμήσει τῶν παϑημάτων αὐτοῦ κοινὰ χήσαντες). It is not only an «imitation,» but rather a participation, or a similitude. «Christ was crucified and buried in reality, but to you it is given to be crucified, buried, and raised with Him in similitude» (ἐν ὁμοιώματι).²⁶⁰ It should be kept in mind that St. Cyril mentions not only the death, but also the burial. This means that in baptism man descends «sacramentally» into the darkness of death, and yet with the Risen Lord rises again and crosses over from death to life. «And the image is completed all upon you, for you are the image of Christ,» concludes St. Cyril. In other words, all are held together by and in Christ, hence the very possibility of a sacramental «resemblance.»²⁶¹

St. Gregory of Nyssa dwells on the same point. There are two aspects in baptism. Baptism is a birth and a death. Natural birth is the beginning of a mortal existence, which begins and ends in corruption. Another, a new birth, had to be discovered, which would initiate into eternal life. In baptism «the presence of a Divine power transforms what is born with a corruptible nature into a state of incorruption.»²⁶² It is transformed through following and imitating; and thus what was foreshown by the Lord is realized. Only by following after Christ can one pass through the labyrinth of life and come out of it. «For I call the inescapable guard of death, in which sorrowing mankind is imprisoned, a labyrinth» (τὴν άδιέξοδον του ϑανάτου ϕρουράν). Christ escaped from this after the three days of death. In the baptismal font «the imitation of all that He has done is accomplished.» Death is «represented» in the element of water, and as Christ rose again to life, so also the newly-baptized, united with Him in bodily nature, «doth imitate the resurrection on the third day.» This is just an «imitation,» and not «identity.» In baptism man is not actually raised, but only freed from natural evil and the inescapability of death. In him the «continuity of vice» is cut off. He is not resurrected, for he does not die, he remains in this life. Baptism only foreshadows the resurrection. In baptism we anticipate the grace of the final resurrection. Baptism is a «homiomatic resurrection» to use the phrase of one Russian scholar. Yet in baptism the resurrection is in a way already initiated. Baptism is the start, ἀρχή, and the resurrection is the end and consummation, πέρας… and all that will take place in the great Resurrection already has its beginnings and causes in baptism. St. Gregory does not mean that resurrection which consists only in a remolding of our composition. Human nature advances towards that goal by a kind of necessity. He speaks of the fulness of the resurrection, of a «restoration to a blessed and divine state, set free from all shame and sorrow.» It is an apokatastasis, a true «resurrection unto life.»²⁶³

It must be pointed out that St. Gregory specially emphasized the need of keeping and holding fast the baptismal grace, for in baptism it is not only nature but also the will that is transformed and transfigured, remaining free throughout. If the soul is not cleansed and purified in the free exercise of will, baptism proves to be fruitless; the transfiguration is not actualized; the new life is not yet consummated. This does not subordinate baptismal grace to human license. Grace does indeed descend. But it can never be forced upon any one who is free and made in the image of God, it must be responded to and corroborated by the synergism of love and will. Grace does not quicken and enliven the closed and obstinate souls, the really «dead souls.» Response and co-operation are required.²⁶⁴ That is just because baptism is a sacramental dying with Christ, a participation in His voluntary death, in His sacrificial Love and this can be accomplished only in freedom. Thus in baptism the death of Christ on the Cross is reflected or portrayed as in a living and sacramental image. Baptism is at once a death and a birth, a burial and a «bath of regeneration,» «a time of death and a time of birth,» to quote St. Cyril of Jerusalem.²⁶⁵

In the Early Church the rite of Christian initiation was not divided. Three of the sacraments belong together: Baptism, the Holy Chrism (Confirmation), and the Eucharist. The Initiation described by St. Cyril, and later on by Cabasilas, included all three.

Sacraments are instituted in order to enable man to participate in Christ’s redeeming death and thereby to gain the grace of His resurrection. This was Cabasilas’ main idea. «We are baptized in order to die by His death and to rise by His resurrection. We are anointed with the chrism that we may partake of His kingly anointment of the deification. And when we are fed with the most sacred Bread and do drink the most Divine Cup, we do partake of the same flesh and the same blood Our Lord has assumed, and so we are united with Him, Who was for us incarnate, and died, and rose again… Baptism is a birth, and Chrism is the cause of acts and movements, and the Bread of life and Cup of thanksgiving are the true food and the true drink.²⁶⁶ In the whole sacramental and devotional life of the Church, the Cross and the Resurrection are «imitated» and reflected in manifold symbols and rites. All the symbolism is realistic. These symbols do not merely remind us of something in the past. Through these sacred symbols, the ultimate Reality is in very truth disclosed and conveyed. All this hieratic symbolism culminates in the august mystery of the Holy Altar. The Eucharist is the heart of the Church, the Sacrament of Redemption in an eminent sense. It is more than an «imitatio.» It is Reality itself, veiled and disclosed in the Sacrament.

It is «the perfect and final Sacrament,» says Cabasilas, «and one cannot go further, and there is nothing to be added.» It is the «limit of life» – ζωῆς τὸ πέρας. «After the Eucharist there is nothing more to long for, but we have to stay here and learn how we can preserve this treasure to the end.»²⁶⁷

The Eucharist is the Last Supper itself, again and again enacted, but not repeated for every new celebration does not only represent, but truly is the same «Mystical Supper» which was celebrated for the first time by the Divine High Priest Himself, «in the night in which He was given up or rather gave Himself for the life of the world.»

The true Celebrant of each Liturgy is Our Lord Himself. This was stressed with great power by St. John Chrysostom on various occasions. «Believe, therefore, that even now it is that Supper, at which He Himself sat down. For this one is in no respect different from that one. For neither doth man make this one and Himself that one, but both this and that are His own work. When therefore thou seest the priest delivering it unto thee, account not that it is the priest that does so, but that it is Christ’s hand that is stretched out.»²⁶⁸ And again in hom. 82, 5, Col. F.44: «He that then did these things at that Supper, this same now also works them. We hold the rank of ministers. He who sanctifieth and changeth them is the Same. This table is the same as that, and hath nothing less. For it is not that Christ wrought that, and man this, but He doth this too. This is that Upper Chamber, where they were then.»²⁶⁹ And «Christ now also is present, He who adorned that table is He who now also adorns this… The priest stands fulfilling a figure, but the power and grace are of God.»²⁷⁰

All this is of primary importance. The Last Supper was an offering of the sacrifice of the Cross. The offering is still continued. Christ is still acting as the High Priest in His Church. The Mystery is all the same. The Sacrifice is one. The Table is one. The priest is the same. And not one Lamb is slain, or offered this day, and another of old; not one here, and another somewhere else. But the same always and everywhere. One very Lamb of God, «who ‘taketh’ the sins of the world,» even the Lord Jesus.

The Eucharist is a sacrifice, not because Jesus is slain again, but because the same Body and the same sacrificial Blood are actually here on the Altar, offered and presented. And the Altar is actually the Holy Grave, in which the Heavenly Master is falling asleep. Nicolas Cabasilas put this in these words: «In offering and sacrificing Himself once for all, He did not cease from His priesthood, but He exercises this perpetual ministry for us, in which He is our advocate with God for ever, for which reason it is said of Him, Thou art a priest for ever.»²⁷¹

The resurrecting power and significance of Christ’s death are made manifest in full in the Eucharist. The Lamb is slain, the Body broken, the Blood shed, and yet it is a celestial food, and «the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ,» to use the famous phrase of St. Ignatius.²⁷² It is «the heavenly Bread and the Cup of life.» This tremendous Sacrament is for the faithful the very «Betrothal of the Life Eternal.» Because Christ’s Death itself was the Victory and the Resurrection, this Victory and this Triumph do we observe and celebrate in the Sacrament of the Altar. Eucharist means thanksgiving. It is a hymn rather than a prayer. It is the service of triumphant joy, the continuous Easter, the kingly feast of the Lord of Life and glory. «And so the whole celebration of the Mystery is one image of the whole economy of our Lord,» says Cabasilas.²⁷³

The Holy Eucharist is the climax of our aspirations. The beginning and the end are here linked together: the reminiscences of the Gospels and the prophecies of the Revelation, i.e. the fulness of the New Testament. The Eucharist is a sacramental anticipation, a foretaste of the Resurrection, an «image of the Resurrection» (ὁ τύπος της ἀναπαύσεως; the phrase is from the consecration prayer of St. Basil). The sacramental life of believers is the building up of the Church. Through the sacraments, and in them, the new life of Christ is extended to and bestowed upon the members of His Body. Through the sacraments the Redemption is appropriated and disclosed. One may add: In the sacraments is consummated the Incarnation, the true reunion of man with God in Christ.

О Christ, Passover great and most Holy! О Wisdom, Word, and Power of God! Vouchsafe that we may more perfectly partake of Thee in the days of Thine everlasting Kingdom. (Easter Hymn, recited by the priest at every celebration).