The Incarnation and You: What You Need to Know

Warning: Pedantry Ahead. It can't be helped, as it lays a foundation for the fun to follow.

We've been drawing from an excellent little tome called The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys, by Andrew Louth. Plotinus is the last pagan discussed before moving on to Origen, the first Christian covered in the book. For Origen, "the soul's ascent to God" -- AKA (↑) --

begins, or is made possible, by what God has done for us in Christ.... The mystical life is the working-out, the realizing, of Christ's union with the soul effected in baptism, and is a communion, a dialogue, between Christ and the soul.

We might call this dia-logos (↑↓). Now, Plotinus was able to ascend pretty, pretty far via (↑) alone. Problem is, he wasn't able to take Plotinus with him, as union with O meant the extinction of himself. D'oh! 

Switching over to a book on the Incarnation and its consequences, Mascall echoes Origen, writing that "sanctification is the progressive realization" of "the change that was made in the ontological realm by baptism."

In other words, baptism entails an actual change in reality. I want to say that the Incarnation is the necessary condition for the possibility of this transformation, but that we remain sufficient conditions -- i.e., we must choose to participate in the ongoing real-ization of this realchange. 

To express it in abstract terms, while the Incarnation provides the (↓) that has forever joined heaven and earth, we nevertheless must exert our own (↑) to facilitate the return. Christ has done the heavy lifting, but this doesn't mean we don't do any lifting at all (at least in orthodox theology). 

In this regard, it is important to emphasize the fact that Christ is actually both --  (↓) and (↑) -- but that we may hitch a ride on the vertical winds of the latter, so to speak, via insertion into the nonlocal body of Christ. 

This answers the wholly reasonable question of what the Incarnation -- an event that happened over two thousand years ago -- has to do with us. Again,

the Incarnation must be viewed as the taking up of manhood into God and not as the conversion of Godhead into flesh. 

Importantly, Christ cannot be a "new person," for Before Abraham was, I am. 

The Person of this human nature was not created, as in the case of all other human beings; it was the pre-existent Word or Logos.

Therefore,

we are not concerned with the production of a new person, but with the assumption of a new nature by a Person who already exists.

Big. Difference. 

The divinity of the Person is derived from his eternal generation by God the Father, in virtue of which he is, as it were, the Father's alter ego...

Yes, his yoke is easy but this is a difficult and ticksy doctrine that is easily misunderstood, especially due to the difference between Person and human being: Jesus assumes human nature while retaining his divine personhood. As such he is not -- unlike the restavus -- a human person. Again, tricksy, because he is the only human being who is not a human person.

No wonder they had to have all those early councils to work out these critical distinctions. The bottom line is that Christ is nothing less than

a new creation of manhood out of the material of the fallen human race. There is continuity with the fallen race through the manhood taken from Mary; there is discontinuity through the fact that the Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos.

This is a Very Strange Doctrine, for which reason we once quipped that the weird became flesh, but I was wrong, because it's weirder than that. For this is 

the Creator himself becoming man and moulding human nature to the lineaments of his own Person. Christ is quite literally the Second Adam, the Man in whom the human race begins anew. 

Here again, this is the "fourth bang" to which we alluded couple posts back, the first three being Existence, Life, and (human) Consciousness. "In him human nature is made afresh" by "the uncreated and pre-existent Person of the divine Word."

As rational soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.

Too weird, or not weird enough? 

As to the third bang, when, "in the course of biological evolution some sub-human creature received from the Creator that spiritual soul which made him the first man," we do not suppose that "some sub-human element had to be removed to make room for it."

Rather, it is very much as if the sub-human was assumed, or something, into the human. We're still primates, but of a very special sort. But where is the line between the human and infra-human? 

The whole range of animal life was caught up into the higher mode of life proper to a spiritual and rational being, yet without any destruction in the process.

In other words, not "by the conversion of spirit into ape, but by the taking up of apehood into spirit." And here we are: the monkey in the middle: "animals are imperfect beasts, man is a perfect beast."

Or perfectible, rather, for "the relation of spirit to animal in man" is analogous to "the relation of Godhood to manhood in Christ."

But only analogously. At any rate, in

the formation of the first man, there would be a lifting up into the human order of a being that already existed on the animal plane.

Whereas "we are forbidden to suppose that the Word assumed to himself an already existing man."

For "What was assumed into God was not a man but manhood." And that makes all the (big) difference. 

The point is, if we appreciate the mysterious fusion of such disparate elements in ourselves -- of matter, ape, and human -- it shouldn't be such a leap to wrap our minds around "the union of Godhead and manhood in the one Christ."

"The question isn't whether it it is easy, but whether it is possible." I'm going with possible. It is not possible for man to become God, but it is certainly not impossible for man to be assumed into God, since we know damn well that once upon a timeless animality was assumed into humanness.