Humanity

M. C. STEENBERG

“Humanity” derives from the Latin humanitas, referring to the whole of the human race. In theological terms, it may refer both to the collective species of the human creature, or to the nature of man. Hence, in Orthodox theological writings, “humanity” describes both the created essence of man (thus being largely synony­mous with “human nature”), or the race of those creatures who bear this nature.

THEOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALS

Christianity is, at its heart, a story of humanity. It takes its beginning from the apostolic encounter with the Son of God met and known in his humanity, and through that encounter reveals the econ­omy of the salvation of humanity as a whole. The starting point for an Orthodox understanding of humanity, then, is not in a narrative or scientific definition of abstract origins of species, but in the concrete humanity encountered in the incarnate Jesus Christ. It is his person that reveals to us the authentic contours of human nature, as well as its potential for restoration and perfection in union with God.

Too often, attempts to articulate a Christian definition of humanity begin with wholly protological discussions (that is, those that deal with origins, with crea­tion). However, the christological revelation of human nature demands that the initial point of reference is not the first man (Adam), but the perfected man: the New Adam, Jesus. So it is that the fundamental affirmations the church makes about humanity come from the example of the incarnate Lord. These affirmations begin with the experience of Christ’s humanity as created and material: that he was born in the flesh and so existed in his earthly sojourn. Human nature, as beheld in this human Christ, is affirmed as a material nature, made by God of the stuff of the cosmos – that very act and reality thereby affirming the sanctity of the material in the most transcendent order possible. Human­ity cannot be understood as a spiritual nature residing in a secondary material shell, or as existing in some state of corpo­real purgatory: to be human is fundamen­tally to be material, and the existence of Christ in his material human nature enshrines the Orthodox confession that this physicality is not a defect in human nature, but a holy dimension of human­kind’s created state.

This material aspect to human nature does not mean, however, that humanity is solely corporeal. The incarnate Christ revealed a humanity in which the physical body was wholly united to an immaterial soul, and the lengthy theological disputes over the relation­ship between this human soul and the eternal existence of the Logos (as, for example, in the Apollinarian disputes of the 4th century and the Monothelite disputes of the 7th) emphasize how central this confession was, and is, to the Orthodox vision of the Son. In terms of the Son’s incarnational witness to human nature, it affirms that humanity is fundamentally a commingling ofmaterial and immaterial, in which the sacredness of both elements of its composition is affirmed by their perfect union and concord.

Further, the incarnate Christ, who is confessed to exist as perfect God as well as perfect man, conveys a third dimension to the nature ofhumanity: in addition to being material as well as immaterial (of body and of soul), the human creature is fashioned to attain and exist in union with God himself. Beholding the true union of divine and human in the incarnation, humanity is able to see that its nature is wholly capable of union with God, and that its created condition does not bar it from such union. In this way, Christ’s incarnation shows the doctrine of deification to be a fundamental precept of an Orthodox understanding of humanity. Such deifying communion with the Father is the natural potential of every human creature, as fashioned first in Adam and met in perfection in the Son.

FROM THE INCARNATION TO CREATION

Mention of Adam draws our attention to creation. Taking its beginning from the revelation of the incarnate Christ, Ortho­doxy articulates the origins of humanity from this incarnational perspective. The chief scriptural confessions of humanity’s creation, used in conveying the story of human origins, come in Genesis 1–3 and John 1. It is the gospel’s accounting of creation by the Word, “through whom all things were made” (Jn. 1.3), and in whom was the life of man (cf. Jn. 1.4), that the fully christological perspective of Gene­sis has its orientation. When the opening book of the Scriptures relates that “In the beginning God created’ (Gen. 1.1), and later that the Lord “formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2.7), the church is able to confess that this Creator God is none other than the eternal Son, that the breath is that of the Spirit. Similarly, the church is able to see the confession that man is created “in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen. 1.26, 28) as a wholly trinitarian proclamation, in which humanity’s fashioning after the image of the Son is identified – he who is “the Image of the invisible God, the first­born over all creation” (Col. 1.15).

This incarnational vision opens up a number of key realities in the scriptural accountings of humanity’s first formation. First of all, the fact that it is fashioned directly by the “hands” of God (the Son and Spirit) sets it apart from all else in the created order. While God fashions all that exists, only humanity is taken up from the dust, rather than being called into creation by a command alone. This unique intimacy in the manner of humanity’s formation iden­tifies in the creation story a reality already seen in the incarnation of the Son; namely, that humanity is fashioned for a particular and precious union with its Maker (that very union seen perfected in the harmony of divine and human natures in the Son). Sim­ilarly, the fact that God “breathed into [man’s] nostrils the breath of life” shows forth the spiritual dimension of that incar- national communion, by which humanity’s life becomes fulfilled in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Thus the creation story is seen to reveal the very dimension of human exis­tence of which St. Paul would speak in writ­ing to the church at Corinth: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God ... ?” (1Cor. 6.19).

Secondly, the scriptural creation accounts emphasize the dual reality of human nature to which Christ’s incarnation bears witness; namely, the material and immaterial realities in man. While Genesis relates a human formation in which the handiwork of God is truly a “dust creature” (indeed, the Hebrew Adam is built on the same word root as Adama, “dust”), thus intrinsically material and corporeal, this creature is nonetheless only a “living being” (Gen. 2.7) when the physical body is infused with the breath of God. The cre­ation sagas therefore show forth humanity as a composite creature, in which these two aspects of materiality and immateriality are intrinsic to the living, God-fashioned, creature.

There is some variation among the fathers of the church as to whether this composite reality of humanity is best expressed as being “bi-partite” (that is, a composite of two elements: body and soul) or “tri-partite” (of three: body, soul, and spirit); and they, like the Scriptures on which they are normally commentating, at times alternate between the two descriptions (e.g., Mt. 10.28; 1Thes. 5.23). In fact, the variation between the two serves to emphasize the very points revealed through the incarnation: that man is of mate­rial as well as immaterial dimensions (body and soul), and fashioned for union with the Father’s Spirit. Expressing humanity as a creature of body, soul, and spirit points to the union in the one Spirit – the Holy Spirit. This was perhaps expressed most clearly in the writings of St. Irenaeus of Lyons:

As the body animated by the soul is certainly

not itself the soul, but has fellowship with the soul as long as God desires, so also the soul herself is not life, but partakes in the life bestowed on her by God. Wherefore also the prophetic word declares ofthe first made man, “He became a living soul,” teaching us that by participation in life the soul became alive. Thus the soul and the life which it possesses must be understood as separate existences. (Against Heresies 2.34.4)

St. Irenaeus, like other fathers, draws atten­tion to the fact that that condition of com­munion in God’s Spirit is intrinsic to the created state of the human creature, while at the same time the Spirit is never a creaturely part of man, but rather the fruit of his union with God.

CREATED INTO THE IMAGE OF GOD

Mention has already been made of the scrip­tural affirmation that humanity is created in the “image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1.26, 28). Just what constitutes the “image” after which humanity is fashioned finds different expression among various fathers of the church. For some, it is the possession of an immaterial soul; for others, the freedom and dominion of the human creature which reflects God’s own; for some, the fashioning into the form of the incarnate Son; for others, the creative potential in humanity that reflects the nature of the Creator. What is common to all of these differing expres­sions is the notion that humanity created “after God’s image” implies a direct connec­tion between the Creator and the creature, realized across the various dimensions of human nature. One encounters, in the human creature, a vision of God in whose image the creature is fashioned, and whose contours it thus bears forth into the cosmos. In this way, humanity serves as an “icon” of God in creation.

What is important to the scriptural testimony of the divine image is the differentiation maintained between Christ who is the “Image proper” and humanity which is created after or according to this true Image which is Christ. Being created “after the image of God” is thus a participatory reality, not a static dimen­sion of human existence. At times, in the patristic teachings, the phrase “image and likeness” is taken as a single unit; at others, a distinction is drawn between image and likeness, with the latter being the actual approximation of the human creature to God into whose image the creature has been fashioned. In this latter distinction, “image” is generally taken to describe the unchanging nature of humanity as created by God, while “likeness” refers to the actual living out and realization of this image.

THE ONE RACE OF ONE BLOOD

As all humanity is fashioned by God and fully exists in communion with him, humanity is itself created for unity. Charac­teristic of the church fathers is the reading of humanity’s interconnection through St. Paul’s analogy of the one body with many members (Rom. 1.4). Rather than as autonomous beings in social or fraternal association, the patristic writings tend to treat of humanity as a single organic entity – “one race” of “one blood” – which experi­ences both its advantages and disadvantages in the contact of this unity. The theological implication of this vision is that sin and redemption operate both at the personal level in the human economy, but also at the level of humanity as a whole.

Once again, this vision takes its center­ing in Christ. Writing on the taking up of human nature by the Son, St. Athanasius the Great would emphasize that in so doing he “joined himself to all by a like nature, and naturally clothed all with incorruption” (On the Incarnation of the

Word 9), just as St. Gregory the Theologian would later famously remark, in the context of a christological debate, that Christ took to himself the entirety of human nature, “since what is not assumed is not healed” (Epistle 101). While these are important texts in the context of christological discus­sion, with regard to the church’s vision of humanity they are equally central. Each shows forth, through an emphasis on the true and full humanity of the Lord in the incarnation, the manner in which the human race is seen “summed up” in human nature itself – that Christ, by becoming fully human, affects and transforms the lives of every human. So it is that by taking on human nature he unites to himself the whole ailing race; so it is that in assuming humanity to himself, he saves humanity therapeutically as a whole.

So it is, too, that Christ shows forth a “re-heading” of the one body of which St. Paul spoke, and in so doing reveals the intrinsically interconnected nature of the race. At the same time, this witness to humanity’s redemption through the race’s union with God discloses the manner in which sin has affected it, historically as well as in present and ongoing experience. Just as “when one member of the body suffers, the whole suffers with it” (1Cor. 12.26), the engagement in sin by any mem­ber of the “one blood” has detrimental effects on the whole. Thus, while Ortho­doxy has always resisted the idea that human nature is somehow altered or made deficient through sin itself, humanity per­ceived as a single body has always provided it with an effective way of understanding how sin in one place or era affects the lives of men and women in another; of how sin itself can become the context of the whole race’s existence.

This same witness of humanity’s inter­connection as one race lies behind the missionary imperative of Orthodox ascesis. While ascesis is important at a personal level, as the struggle to overcome sin and the passions in one’s life, it is important too as a ministry to the whole of the human race – a race which is wounded when any­one sins, and which is healed when anyone is redeemed. This is the theology of the human person that lies behind one of the most famous of the apophthegmata of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “acquire the Spirit of peace within you, and a thousand around you will be saved.” The interconnected nature of humanity means that each human person has at his or her disposal a share in the stature of all humankind. A sin committed may wound the race, and yet a life transformed through struggle and the grace of God may serve to heal it in its wholeness; and this is why the ascetical struggle to which each Christian person is called is understood in the church to be a missionary work for the redemption of all humankind.

SUMMARY

Humanity, therefore, is understood in Orthodoxy as that reality experienced in the incarnate Jesus Christ; there wholly united to divinity. That union shows forth the authentic contours of the human crea­ture which God had once fashioned from the dust, and which at every birth he fashions anew. This being composed of body and soul, ofmateriality and the imma­terial, is fashioned for a life of communion in the Spirit; enabled to this through its crafting and recrafting by the Son. By virtue of its one blood as well as its union in the one God, humanity is a single body in which each person is a member, ofprecious value to, and of singular influence upon, the entire whole. This vision of humanity reveals both the full scope of the tragedy of sin, but also the nature of man’s redemp­tion in Christ, who takes humanity to himself in its wholeness and thereby draws it fully into the eternal life of God.

SEE ALSO: Christ; Deification; Soteriology

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Lossky, V. (1997) In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2008) The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.