THE ONE INCARNATION AND THE MANY INCARNATIONS
I
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, "This was He of whom I said, 'He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.'" And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.”
John 1:1-3, 14-16
“Creation is the Word’s condescension to become what he is not by nature – wherein he offers himself for the creation of beings from nothingness, for their consumption by being, being-well, and being forever – wherein he offers himself, finally, to be who they are and they who he is.”
Jordan Daniel Wood [1]
One of the most important things to learn and understand as a Christian, whether you’re interested in academic theology or not, is that Christ is not just the revelation of God to man, but also of man to himself. In fact, these seemingly different revelations are two sides, or levels, of the same overarching revelation, and is seen in the two piece commandment all Christians are to follow: Love God, and love your neighbour. You can’t do one without the other. This means, for the Christian, the historical incarnation, as understood in light of the councils and tradition (as indeterminate and apophatic as these tend to be), guides not just what we understand as essential to God, but also what is essential to man, and by extension (due to man being a “microcosm”), what is essential to creation itself. In trying to understand this, I have been led to the conclusion, written on this blog more than once, that creation itself can be described as the cosmic incarnation of the Son.
Of course there is another way to this conclusion, that of Classical theism itself, which, due to Divine Simplicity, holds that “God is what God does”. This logic is inherent in the Trinity where the Son is God begotten by God the Father. In essence, the Son is what the Father “does” by his Spirit. The Father is God uncaused, the proper “Uncaused cause”, while the Son is “caused” or “begotten” (following the Athanasian creed), their unity being the Spiration of the Spirit, who is also God by this same principle. The Son is the very hypostasis of the principle “God is what God does”, and creation is then seen as the “finitization” of this principle, and in some sense the “finitization” of God, and not God as such, but specifically God the Son. To clarify, this is not to say that the Son is contingent on creation, rather the opposite: Because the Father is free, He begets and spirates Son and Spirit. Because the Son is free, He incarnates, His incarnation is itself creation, His role in its actualization:
“Creation does not complete the divine nature, but the most profound logos of the divine nature – utterly dark to our gaze – is to exceed itself in becoming identical in person to what God is not by nature.”
Jordan Daniel Wood [1]
The Father, by His Spirit, creates in the Son, through the Son being the very being of creation. As Milbank put it: “the peaceful unity that pertains between God and his created order is God himself.” [2].
II
“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”
Galatians 2:20
"Know thyself," said the inscription of the temple at Delphi; and the same is also expressed by this hadith: "Whoso knoweth his soul, knoweth his Lord"; and similarly the Veda: "That art thou"; namely Atma, the Self at once transcendent and immanent, which projects itself into myriads of relative subjectivities undergoing cycles and determined by localizations, and which extend from the least flower to that direct divine Manifestation which is the Avatara.
Frithjof Schuon [3]
“The mystery of the two natures is a mystery inherent in our own deepest selves, and Christology is a matter finally of esoteric anthropology.”
James Cutsinger [4]
To move from the cosmic incarnation to the particular incarnation in human individuals is fraught with risk, because many misunderstand what it means to say each particular human is an “incarnation”. Understandably, this causes unease because it invites the temptation to worship oneself or other people apart from and against God. But, understood right, this truth of incarnation is itself a call to worship God alone, because for the Christian this truth is identical with the truth of the historical incarnation and the understanding of salvation as “Theosis”.
Theosis entails that we become “like God”, we take on His attributes. These are usually known as the “fruits of the Spirit” or “Virtues”. This is no easy task, it involves what we often call “dying to the self” or “living in the Spirit”, which isn’t to be like John Constantine with his magic tricks, but exactly to be like Christ, and not just His humanity, but also His divinity. For example, David Bentley Hart says this about apatheia (impassibility), understood as an attribute of God:
“This tradition reaches its most profoundly developed form in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, whose Chapters on Love is a virtual manual of instructions for the cultivation of apatheia, which is to say, for him, the cultivation of a spiritual vision that—having divested itself of all the fantasies summoned up by self-love, pride, the desire for power, and all other sins—can see all things with a pure heart, as images and reflections of the Logos who shaped them, and so love them without restraint, with a love so perfect that no perturbation or pathos can obviate its intensity. The mind’s life of illumination, he says, is born only of love, which is possible only for a mind purged of all hatred for others, because God is love itself and can be known and possessed only in love. Again, the attainment of this love is a refinement of the soul’s innate dynamisms, so that concupiscence is transformed into divine desire and irascibility into divine love, and this grants us a true delight in divine beauty. And this state of mind is, for Maximus, properly called apatheia.” [5]
God is exactly the fullness of those gifts of the Spirit. By manifesting them, one incarnates God, becoming a part of his “body”, realizing that “yet it is not I, but Christ”. The ego, the false self (the “flesh”) that seeks gratification, dies, and your true self, “Christ in you”, is realized. This is what is meant by “incarnation”. It is, in essence, becoming Christ in your particularity, which, in the heights attainable in this present life, looks eerily like an actual historical incarnation, and I’d argue it is one in a sense. Not that we become the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but that we incarnate in our particularity as human individuals the uncreated Logos who is the person of Jesus. This distinction is crucial, because Christ as Jesus of Nazareth was and is (he is resurrected after all) unmistakably a Jewish man with his own peculiarities gotten from that culture, time, and personal experience as a man (plus as Jesus of Nazareth he is still our Lord and King, and well beyond us as our exemplar and the particular manifestation of the Logos that himself defines Christianity), but the Logos he is isn’t limited by that body or culture, because the Divine nature is unlimited [4]. He is at once the One, and the Many, not by nature, but by hypostasis [1]. By Theosis we become a “historical incarnation”, precisely by participating in, and submitting to, him in whom that incarnation is both particular in Jesus of Nazareth and cosmic in the creation itself.
What this means is that, just as Christ’s person is the uncreated logos, and Christ’s “mode” of being human is the true way to be human, so must our Theosis result in our person being that of the uncreated logos. This result is obviously not fully achievable until the resurrection, when we will “be as he is” (1 John 3:2), and a man’s metaphysical make up becomes identical to Christ’s, and is Christ. But even now, this truth of our person shines in even the most depraved persons in hell. The “image of God” in man, who is Christ, is a gift that is never revoked, because without it, man is not, and man, universal or particular, cannot truly die. They are all included in the resurrection, where the fire of God purifies by assumption. Wolfgang Smith, quoting John Scotus, says:
“"Likewise, I believe," John Scotus goes on to say, "will the corporeal substance go over into the soul, not to perish, but that, having been elevated to a more excellent condition, it shall be preserved. So too one must suppose that the soul, having been received into the intellect, becomes more beautiful and more similar to God. In the same way I think of the entry into God not perhaps of all, but certainly of rational substances-in whom they shall reach their goal, and in whom they shall all become one." [6]
This assumption into God is the other side of the incarnation, whereas God became man, man now becomes God.
III
“I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed… And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.”
Daniel 7:13-14, 27
“God goes forth in all beings and in all beings returns to himself, as even Aquinas (following a long Christian tradition) affirms; but God also does this not as an expression of his dialectical struggle with some recalcitrant exteriority- some external obstacle to be surmounted or some unrealized possibility to be achieved- but rather as the manifestation of an inexhaustible power wholly possessed by the divine in peaceful liberty in eternity.”
David Bentley Hart [7]
“To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Colossians 1:27
What do these words mean for us? Well, in terms of practice, it doesn’t change much, if anything at all, if you’re already on the road of virtue. All that is here is my putting in words what many saints and their disciples have been practicing for millennia. In terms of theory, well, I’ll end this with how this affects our understanding of the creator-creature distinction and our freedom in (and not from) God.
For the former, it shows the subtleties of this distinction, to the point of seemingly violating the law of non-contradiction: God is the infinite, Creation is finite, the finite isn’t the infinite, yet it is in the infinite, and therefore it is the infinite. God + creation =/= 2. They aren’t 2 different entities. God as infinite necessarily encompasses all things, including creation, but creation as finitude isn’t the divine essence, yet as “part” of the infinite by “inclusion”, it is the infinite. There are two senses in how the “finite” is used the above formulation, which, because the law of non-contradiction says “’A’ cannot be ‘not A’ at the same time in the same respect”, means that contrary to appearances, the logic used in the above formulation doesn’t contradict itself. In one respect, according to natures, Creation is not God, the natures are distinct, this is the sense in which the creator-creature distinction is understood. In another respect however, according to hypostases, creation is God [1], God the Son to be particular. The creator-creature distinction does not apply here because it refers to the natures, not the hypostases.
For the latter, it is important to realise that our freedom is never independence from God, but freedom in God. Scripture always frames true freedom as independence from sin, rather than independence from God. That we are distinct from God in nature doesn’t mean we are independent from God. Rather, it is the opposite. Our natures depend on God’s gratuitous creation of them ex nihilo, and as such is united to him in the hypostasis of His Son. In other words, whatever identity you have in opposition to God is a false identity, it is the ego, the flesh, that you think is you but is a delusion that only the divine light can dispel. It is only in theosis, starting now but also in the life beyond that we see the extent of this delusion. We often think we have to assert our individuality apart from God, and that all God can do, in respect of our freedom, is “persuade”. But God is not an object or entity on the “outside” that persuades another entity separate from him. God is closer than your soul, He is your very being, your very “individuality”. He doesn’t “persuade”. It is rather that we “remember”. God reminds us, or rather Himself in us. All sin is the attempt at forgetting, it is a failure to be, a failure to remember, a failure to be truly created. God, even though he is our deepest identity, doesn’t sin. As Paul said, it is not I, but sin in me, warring against the spirit of God that is my deepest self. We, the deluded ones who don’t really exist, sin, and until that delusional self is destroyed, our identities, “Christ in you”, remain hidden to us.
Wood, J. D., (2017). Creation Is Incarnation : The Metaphysical Peculiarity Of The Logoi In Maximus Confessor 1. 7177. https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12382
Milbank, J. (1997). History of the one God. 371–400.
Schuon, F., Universal Eschatology. 6–14.
Cutsinger, J. S. (2002). The Mystery of the Two Natures © 2002. 2(1998).
Hart, D. B., The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Smith, W., Wisdom Of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition.
Hart, D. B. (2019). That All Shall Be Saved. In That All Shall Be Saved. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4