How Can One Say That God Has Become Human?

Christianity makes the astounding claim that the world is created. No reality is the cause of itself. All things that we experience to exist are derived, and on this understanding, given being from another. They are derivative from an unknown source that is called God. God simply is, God is personal, and God creates all things, continually sustaining them in being. God is also an unknown mystery. Present at the heart of all that is, God is within the world, and closer to us than we are to ourselves, precisely as the cause of all that is, but God is not identical with the creation. Instead, God is distinct from the created world that he actively gives existence to, and he remains transcendent of and hidden to our immediate human understanding. God, we might say, is present to us mysteriously but also naturally inaccessible, or only very imperfectly knowable.

Accordingly, Christianity makes a second and not less astounding claim, that God, the author of all that exists, has become human, precisely so that we might truly come to know God and even participate by grace in the eternal life of God. Jesus of Nazareth is, on this Christian telling of things, the human icon of God, or as the Letter to the Colossians (1:15) puts it: “the image of the invisible God,” one in whom God has become human without ceasing to be God so as to manifest himself to us. Indeed, we can see that the writings of the New Testament ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth a series of divine terms, normally reserved for the God of Israel. He is the Lord (Rom. 1:7; 5:1; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2), He who is (John 8:28; 8:58), the eternal Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1-3), the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), the uncreated splendor of the Father (Heb. 1:1-2), the pre-existent Son of God (John 17:5; Phil. 2:6).

Furthermore, the earliest Christians, who were themselves first century Jews, clearly worshiped Jesus, a practice that they understood well to be reserved to God alone according to prescriptions of the Torah.[1] God, on their telling, has become human, and has suffered a human death by way of Roman crucifixion. He has also been exalted or glorified in his human nature, in the resurrection. Thus they worshiped the Lord Jesus Christ. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is, on their view, a first instantiation of a new creation.[2] God, St. Paul tells us, is remaking the world in Christ, and is offering a new life of grace to the world in Christ.[3] This new life in Christ is present to the world in a new way in virtue of the fact that God has become human, that the man Jesus is alive in the resurrection, and in virtue of the grace of Christ that he offers to the human race collectively and universally.

Globally speaking, we can denote the idea mentioned above in a fundamental sense by referring to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation: the novel claim found in the New Testament that God has become human. God has even become perfectly human, and has done so without ceasing to be true and perfect God.[4] But how can God be human and how can an individual human being, Jesus, truly be God? Can we say, as the Council of Ephesus affirmed in 431 AD, that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God? And can we say, as the Second Council of Constantinople did in 553 AD, that the Second person of the Trinity was crucified?[5] Moreover what does it mean to say that Christ is the Son of God or the Word made flesh, a person who is divine, expressing himself in a way that is truly human, living an authentically human life among us, experiencing a genuine human death as one of us, so as to express to us precisely who he is as God, the eternal Word of the Father?

To examine these claims, I make use of the reflections of two highly influential Christian thinkers, John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas. John, who lived in the eighth century, is one of the greatest Byzantine Christian speculative theologians. His work The Orthodox Faith was translated into Latin in the twelfth century by Burgundio of Pisa and read by Thomas Aquinas, who made extensive use of it in his famous Summa Theologiae. The two theologians converge adroitly, we might say, on the semantics of the Incarnation. How should one speak of the person of Christ as true God and true man? How do these two influential Christian thinkers make clear what they believe about God and human nature as each are manifest in the Incarnation, and why do they think it matters concretely that God became human? I begin by considering the famous Christian Chalcedonian definition of the Incarnation that is commonly held by both eastern and western Christians, and then proceed to consider four semantic norms for discourse regarding the Incarnation established by John of Damascus and followed by Aquinas. Finally, I note some ontological presuppositions regarding the mystery of the Incarnation indicated by these thinkers, and draw some conclusions about its historical and cultural significance that remain influential in our own time.

I. The Chalcedonian Definition

We should begin by noting that the early Church of the first six centuries debated the internal content of the New Testament and the primitive apostolic tradition of the Christian faith, so as to formulate gradually a series of conciliar definitions in regard to common belief. These dogmatic definitions were to provide Christian teaching with an identity and stability down through time. The first ecumenical council, that of Nicaea in 325 AD, affirmed the divinity of Christ, consubstantial with the Father, eternally begotten of the Father, not made or created, God from God, light from light, true God from true God. The Council of Constantinople in 381 would add to the Nicene Creed the affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and who has spoke by the prophets. These twin affirmations provided the touchstones for the Trinitarian faith of the ancient Catholic Church. From them we derive the Nicene Creed.

However, in 431 the Church turned more directly to the topic of Christology, with the affirmation at the Council of Ephesus that the man Jesus simply is the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Word made flesh. This council affirmed that there are not two persons or personal subjects in Christ, the eternal Word on the one side and the man Jesus on the other side, a distinct person. Rather, there is one personal subject or individual who is Christ. This is the eternal person of the Word and Son. The man Jesus, then, is the eternal Word made flesh, the eternally begotten Son of God made man. He is not a distinct person who is created. God has become human, we might say, in such a way as to reveal who God is personally, as Son and Word of the Father, in our human nature, as one of us.

This brings us to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, only twenty years after the Council of Ephesus. The occasion for the event was the development of a problematic or heretical position that has come to be termed monophysitism, the idea that there is only one nature in Christ, which is the divine nature, so that we cannot speak of Christ having a true human nature, except in a highly qualified and equivocal manner. This idea was developed by some interpreters of the Council of Ephesus who reasoned that if Jesus is only one person, the eternal person of the Word, and if he is one in being, so too then, he must be one in nature. There is only one nature after the union of God and man that takes place in the Incarnation, and this is the divine nature, such that we cannot speak of a co-existent human nature in Christ.

The Council of Chalcedon formulated a counter-alternative to this position in continuity with Ephesus but in opposition to monophysitism. Simply stated, the council affirmed that there is in Christ only one person, who is genuinely divine and genuinely human, subsisting in two natures, as true God and true man:

Following, then, the holy Fathers, all of us in unison teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ; the same one complete in divinity and the same one complete in humanity; the same one truly God and truly a human being consisting of a rational soul and a body; same-in-subsistence with the Father according to his divinity and the same one same-in-subsistence with us according to his humanity, like us in every respect except for sin, begotten before the ages from the Father according to his divinity and in the last days the same one for us and for our salvation from the Virgin Mary the Theotokos (Mother of God) according to his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-Begotten, acknowledged in two natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, undividedly, inseparably, the difference between the two natures being in no way destroyed because of the union but instead the distinctive feature of each nature being preserved and coming together into one person and one hypostasis; not separated or divided into two persons but one and the same Son.[6]

The council clearly presents us here with several key affirmations. Jesus Christ is true God and true man, having a perfect human nature consisting of both rational soul and body, even as he is perfectly divine. He is the Word and Son of the Father, himself God, in virtue of his divine nature, and he is truly the son of the Virgin Mary in virtue of his human nature. The two natures are united in the one person, by what is traditionally called the hypostatic union or the union in the person of the Son, but the two natures also remain distinct and unconfused, even as they are truly united and inseparable. God become human without ceasing to be God. He becomes truly human and is not only a simulacrum or a phantom of the divine.

Apparently, this way of thinking allows us to ascribe both divine attributes and human attributes to one subject, who is Christ, even as we maintain a distinction of natures in the person of Christ. He is said to be begotten of the Father from all eternity in virtue of his divine nature, and to be born in time of the Virgin, in virtue of his human nature. The notion of the Incarnation that is established by this document is indeed meant to be inherently mysterious, or numinous, not merely transparent to reason like a geometrical demonstration or an empirical observation. At the same time, there clearly is some kind of structure to the Chalcedonian definition and thus to the classical Christian idea of the Incarnation. How then might we make headway in assessing its inward contours and principles?

II. John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas on Semantic Ascriptions

John of Damascus writes about this text some centuries later in Exposition of the Orthodox Faith and establishes a number of semantic norms that are helpful for the interpretation of the Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation.[7] Aquinas follows him on each of these points and in some cases extrapolates from them.[8] For our purposes here I will present the norms in terms of a common position held by each of the thinkers together but will allude at times to one or the other of them, as adding or presenting particular nuances to the position at hand.

The first principle we mentioned by John we might term unity of subject ascription. Simply stated, all that is said of Jesus of Nazareth, whether it is said of him in virtue of his humanity or in virtue of his deity, is said of him as one personal subject or hypostasis. It is the one person of the Word made flesh to whom we ascribe both attributes of the deity, such as the omnipotent goodness by which he works miracles, and attributes of human nature, such as his gestation in the womb, being born of Mary, human growth, learning, suffering, and dying. It is the same person of the Word made flesh who acts in one nature as Lord and God, who also acts co-simultaneously in his other nature as human. There are not two agents, but only one subject and actor, one “who,” manifest in the two natures in which and by which he acts, as the God-human.

This is why the Son of God made man can reach out his hand to touch another, and speak, willing to perform a miracle in his human heart and mind, all in virtue of his one nature as man, and also act in his nature as Lord, by divine intent and omnipotent goodness so as to manifest his hidden ground of unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. John writes in The Orthodox Faith III, c. 3:

We confess that in two perfect natures there is but one subsistence of the Son of God incarnate; holding that there is one and the same subsistence belonging to his divinity and his humanity, and granting that the two natures are preserved in him after the union, but we do not hold that each is separate and by itself, but that they are united to each other in one compound subsistence . . . Therefore, in the case of our Lord Jesus Christ, seeing that we recognize that he has two natures but only one subsistence compounded of both, when we contemplate his natures we speak of his divinity and his humanity, but when we contemplate the subsistence compounded of the natures we sometimes use terms that have reference to his double nature, as Christ, and at once God and man, and God Incarnate; and sometimes those that imply only one of his natures, as God alone, or Son of God, and man alone, or Son of Man; sometimes using names that imply his loftiness and sometimes those that imply his lowliness. For he who is alike God and man is one, being the former from the Father ever without cause, but having become the latter afterwards for his love towards man.[9]

Although it may not be immediately obvious, it is based on this form of thinking that one can rightly say that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God, or that one of the Trinity was crucified.[10] The reason is not because the Virgin Mary gave birth to the uncreated godhead or the divinity of Christ, or that the crucifixion entailed the suffering of the divine nature. The reason is that the one who was born of the Virgin Mary as a human child, the subject himself, is also one who is divine, the Word eternally begotten of the Father. Likewise the one who was crucified personally in his human body and who suffered grievously in both body and soul, through political torture and execution, is also one who is God, transcendent and always perfect in his eternal life, goodness, and mercy.

A second principle then has to do with the real distinction of the two natures of Christ, and the semantic incommensurability of the two. What is denoted of the divine nature as such cannot be attributed to the human nature as such, and what is attributed to the human nature cannot be attributed to the divine nature. So for example it is incorrect to say that the divine nature suffered, died and was buried, or that the eternal life and nature of God became temporal, in Christ. Nor is it true to say that the human nature of God became always everywhere present or all-powerful or infinitely perfect due to the Incarnation. The two natures remain distinct and retain their different properties without intermingling or being redefined in a synthesis of natures that would entail neither perfect divinity or genuine humanity.[11]

Otherwise stated in positive terms, God can become human while remaining eternally himself as God, without any diminution or evolution of his identity as God, just as God can become human so as to be genuinely so, experiencing real human vulnerability, development, growth, suffering, perfection, and death. That God can be both truly divine and truly human at once is a testament to the perfection and goodness of God, not a demonstration of a weakness or a lack on the part of the divine initiative, goodness or wisdom. It is better for God to reveal who he truly is in himself, in his eternal identity and unchanging goodness, precisely by becoming human, and by remaining always human, in the glory of the resurrection. Indeed, as we will come to, this mystery permits God to express just who he really is in himself precisely by and in his co-subsistence with us in what is truly of our human nature.

The third principle has to do with the use of abstract essential terms or nature terms in the concrete to designate an individual. As John Damascene says, it is possible in human discourse to employ a term of nature such as “man” or “human being” to designate a singular person, and we find this in scripture itself, as in the first verse of Job (1:1): “There was a certain man in the land of Uz.” Here the term for nature is employed to designate an individual who possesses that nature.[12] So similarly, Aquinas tells us that we call upon “God” (Deus) personally by using the term to signify one who possesses the divine nature (deitas). Accordingly, then, we can speak of the singular individual person, Jesus Christ, by using nature terms to indicate the subject in question while ascribing to him as attributes those characteristics that pertain to him in virtue of the other of his natures.[13]

We may say then that God was crucified at Golgotha. Or we may say of the infant Jesus, “this child in the crib is the author of the world.” Aquinas makes characteristic use of his Aristotelian epistemology to underscore that we ascribe essential terms to individuals by making intellectual judgments through the medium of our senses, as when we say that “this is a man,” or “a tree” or “a building,” etc. He notes accordingly that if one points at the individual man Jesus, indicating the person by means of the nature, it is possible to say, “this man is not a creature.”[14] The reason is that the person in question is not created, but is uncreated and eternal, even though his humanity is created, and even though the eternal Word became human at a given point in history.[15]

A final principle has to do with the common activity of the two natures. The Council of Chalcedon included in its acts the famous letter of Pope Leo I to Flavian, archbishop of Constantinople, from 449. In that letter, the pope speaks of the two natures in Christ as distinct forms or essences, each with its own operation. He claims, then, that:

Each form does what is peculiar to it in communion with the other. The Word obviously enacts what pertains to the Word and the flesh carries out what pertains to the flesh. One of them gleams with miracles, the other succumbs to injuries. And just as the Word does not withdraw from equality with the Father’s glory, so too does the flesh not leave behind the nature of our kind. For there is one and the same, as we must repeatedly say, who is truly Son of God and truly Son of Man.[16]

Leo’s letter was a source of great controversy in subsequent Byzantine Christian debate. Some theologians of the fifth and sixth centuries claimed that his formulation regarding the two activities or operations of Christ, those of his godhead and those of his humanity, violated the first mentioned principle above, the idea that all of his actions flow from a singular person.[17] However, the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680-81 rejected this notion and affirmed that the one person of the Word made flesh acts truly both as God and as human, in all that he does.[18] Consequently, John of Damascus underscores the harmony and hierarchy of the two actions in Christ.[19] Jesus of Nazareth thinks, wills, speaks, and acts, as a human being, and in so doing, also acts as one who is God, to teach, heal, convey the truth about the mystery of the Father, promise the sending of the Holy Spirit, and so forth.[20]

This idea is of particular consequence, as it suggests that the Incarnation acts as a distinctly human manifestation of the eternal identity of God. The human gestures, words, actions, and even sufferings of the incarnate Son can reveal to us who he is in his person. The divine identity of the Son of God is manifest precisely in and through his human life, suffering, death, and resurrection, in such a way that the hidden unity that he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit comes to be manifest eventually through this human life.

Aquinas takes up this idea in the Summa theologiae, and casts the notion of John of Damascus in terms of what he terms “united” instrumentality.[21] Typically when we speak of an instrument through which we work, in the broadest sense, we designate a reality substantially distinct from our person, such as a pen used for writing or a violin used for playing, or even a foreign minister who is gifted in diplomacy. However, we can also speak of an instrument substantially conjoined to our person, for example, the human hand which is employed by natural reason in various forms of human labor. So accordingly, and by analogy, the Son of God assumes a human nature to himself personally and substantially, so that the human body and soul of Christ are the body and soul of the eternal Son.[22] The Son of God truly subsists as man, and the man Jesus truly is the eternal Son of God. As he says of himself in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am.” This means that when one touches the hand of Jesus, one literally touches God the Son in his person, precisely by touching his human hand. One does not touch his divine nature, which is not corporeal, but one does touch his human nature, by which he is personally corporeal. So similarly if one tortures and crucifies this man, one truly tortures and crucifies God, in his human nature. Jesus also says something to this effect in the Gospel of St. John, where he claims: “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” [John 14:9] and “I and the Father are one,” (John 10:30). Accordingly in the First letter of John we read something analogous: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life,” (1 John 1:1).

Aquinas points out that all the actions and sufferings of Christ that pertain to his human nature are actions and sufferings that may serve instrumentally to express his personal identity as Son of God and Lord.[23] God is able to work through them and in them not only to convey to us a revelation of who God is, but also to communicate grace to the whole of the human race. The actions and sufferings of Christ are submitted to the divine wisdom and will of God and are expressive of that wisdom and will. They manifest the desire of God to redeem the human race, and to communicate to all human beings the gift of participation in divine life, the gift of grace by which human beings may become genuine friends of God, and come to know God by supernatural means of knowledge and love.

III. Why God Became Human and What Notions of Divine Presence This Idea Implies

Our inquiry here is concerned with the distinctly Christian notion of the presence of God in history. Clearly its uniqueness is made evident by the consideration of classical teaching in regard to the understanding of Jesus of Nazareth, and its affirmations regarding the Incarnation of God in our human nature. Nevertheless, we can expand and nuance this analysis by considering the same classical tradition in its understanding of the motives and effects of the Incarnation. Why did God become human, and what effect does this have on the human race? Moreover, even outside of Christian culture as such, there are more general effects of Christian theology of the Incarnation on human intellectual life, including in the modern epoch, and these are worth considering in common with the theological topics just mentioned.

We can proceed then briefly to consider the theological question of the motives and effects of the Incarnation, as understood by John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas. Here too their thought accords in many respects. Even in the late second century, Christian authors such as Irenaeus of Lyon sought to explain the divine motivations for the Incarnation by appeal to a theory of divinization. This is the idea that God became human and united himself to our human nature, so that he might in turn unite make human beings God, in the sense that he wishes to unite human beings to himself by grace.[24]

The idea here is not that human creatures become God, literally, but that they are invited by grace to know and love God in himself, by faith in this life and by vision in the next. This idea of the relationally upward-moving effect of the Incarnation, to unite human beings to God by grace, is found in both John of Damascus and Aquinas.[25] The way that they work out this argument is distinct in each, and has important innovative aspects in Aquinas, who unites John’s arguments on the humanity of Christ as a principle of our beatitude or divinization to key ideas from Augustine and Anselm, notions more typical within western Catholic theology.[26]

Basically, we can enumerate at least five reasons for the incarnation according to these developed views.[27] First, there is a revelatory aspect. It is meaningful for God to become human so that we who are embodied human beings might most perfectly come to know who God is, in virtue of God’s humanity, in which he reveals himself to us through a human life like ours. Second, in doing so he also restores our human nature to a way of life ordered by wisdom, charity, and human righteousness, and in doing so makes possible for us by the grace of Christ a way of life inwardly conformed to Christ, namely a human Christian life ordered by wisdom, charity, and human righteousness. Third, this life can terminate effectively in the beatific vision, or the vision of the essence of God, as a gift of grace. Fourth, Jesus then also provides a human example to us of who we might be and how we might live, even in the most adverse circumstances, while still providing access to a way unto God, including through hope in eternal life and the resurrection of the dead. Fifth, God becomes incarnate to provide for ecclesial life of human being: a universal communion of human beings based on a shared liturgical, sacramental, and educational life of friendship within the Church.

Here to conclude I would like to note three fundamental legacies, cultural and intellectual effects as it were, that stem from this highly unique Christian understanding of the presence of God in history, in virtue of the Incarnation. One pertains to the ontological primacy of the person. The second pertains to a theological understanding of non-competitive agency of Creator and creature, or a thoroughgoing non-rivalry principle of God and humanity. The third has to do with the human iconography of God: how Christianity gave birth to a theory of cosmic liturgy.

The first point, then, concerns the ontological primacy of the person. This is not the least controversial idea to be gleamed from the primitive Christian tradition. It is frequently affirmed that ancient Hellenistic philosophy sought to identify features of common human nature that are present within every culture and city state, so as to construe a theory of ethics or of justice that can provide shared understanding for the measure and evaluation of human action across cultures. In other words, they sought to move from a system of irradicable diverse tribal values, gods, and place-based loyalties, to a more global political and philosophical understanding of the situation of the human being. Socrates defied conventions by asking questions about the nature of piety, justice, the gods and whether there were any, the laws of the city, and so forth, a project quite evidently carried forth by Plato and Aristotle in diverse ways.[28]

Whatever the failures or successes of their efforts, they attempted to bring a philosophy of nature to the forefront, in opposition to what they perceived as a climate of mere cultural perspectives. What they most certainly did not do, however, was to centralize human thought around the notion of the person, as an agent of understanding and volition, and as the bearer of a unique form of individual dignity precisely in virtue of the personal character and nature proper to the individual. This form of thinking, a thought-form centered on the ontology of personal identity and dignity, is most certainly the fruit of Christianity, historically speaking, and it originates primordially in Christian thinking about the transcendent person of Christ, as the Word made flesh, from which it extends over time to thinking about created persons as unique subjects of agency and natural dignity, as beings who are made in the image of God.[29]

We might note in passing that most typical modern European conceptions of individual personal identity or of personal freedom and autonomy bear some real resemblance to older medieval notions of the human person, which are themselves marked indelibly by Christian reflection on personhood.[30] However, the Christian understanding we are alluding to has a decidedly theo-centric character to it. On the understanding of thinkers like John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas, there is transcendent personhood from before the creation of the world, and all things come to be from a mysterious and unknown personal source, the Holy Trinity. The human person is the summit of the visible world, and the creation of human persons entails a deeper divine intention of God to unfold an offer of encounter and participation in the life of God.

In other words, the mystery of being human, of having a personal identity, is ultimately resolvable only by relation to the transcendent and uncreated personhood of God, who can be encountered in virtue of God’s self-revelation in Christ, in the Incarnation, and in the Church. Nevertheless, human beings who are not religious or are not Christian retain the plentitude of their natural dignity as persons made in the image of God, and Aquinas will say even, as a metaphysician, that the person is what is most perfect in all of nature.[31] This ontology of personhood, and of its metaphysical and ethical centrality, is a fruit of Christian culture, to be sure.

Second, let me say a brief world about non-competitive agency. Clearly on the account of the Incarnation we have been exploring here, it is possible for God to be intimately present in the world without the created human nature of Jesus being in any way compromised in its inner essence, or its perfection of natural agency and operation. On the contrary, the view being designated affirms just the inverse. Just because God has truly become human, so then the human being that God has become is perfectly human. There is in Jesus Christ a concrete perfection of human nature, of body and soul, and of the operations of body and soul completely directed back toward God. In Christ we perceive a human nature, a singular man, in whom all is centered on God, one who is most perfectly alive and virtuous, and thus an exemplar of our human nature.

Without being too bold, we can easily extrapolate a more general principle from this one. The plenary agency of a creature is compatible in all cases with the plenary presence of the Creator. After all, if God is most especially present in the world in the Incarnation, and if in this case the most autonomous and most free of created natures is most alive (in the human nature of Christ), then it follows that in all other cases the Creator who is present to his creation as the author of nature and of grace is also one who fully respects and maintains, or even heightens the real natural integrity and autonomy of his creatures, precisely as their Creator and Redeemer.

Think of three examples from the modern era: the controversy about whether God can give being to and govern all things through longstanding physical processes of material nature and biology, from the Big Bang, through the formation of circumstances favorable to organic life, to the emergence of living things, and their evolution from single celled organisms to complex organic systems, all spanning some fourteen billion years. Or the question of whether God can inspire human authors of the Old and New Testaments as genuine historically-culturally situated authors who have their own motives and intentions of time and place that are discernable within their cultural context, even as they may signify truths of universal and theological importance for all of humanity, as being inspired by God. Or the controversy that is more classical of whether God’s grace augments and perfects human nature and human freedom, or whether God’s grace must act as an active principle over and against a merely passive and defective human freedom, or wait passively upon and react to human freedom, as if the two were locked in a competition of mutual rivalry and exclusion of one another.

On all these fronts it is easy to see that the notion of the Incarnation I have presented readily provides a principle with which to make sense of the mutually affirmative, non-competitive vision of God as Creator and cosmic causalities, divine inspiration and free human authorship with its intentions and creativities, the gift of grace and the perfection of human action, whereby freedom is augmented inward perfection, actuation, and range of extension. In fact, historically speaking, this is precisely how Catholic Christian thinking about these various topics has unfolded in the modern era, in logical symmetry with the view of the Incarnation illustrated above.

Third and finally, to conclude, allow me to note a more artistic side of the legacy of the theology I have been presenting, one pertaining to the human iconography of God. John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas both develop theoretical reflections on the divine nature that underscore the transcendence of God and the fact that God’s nature cannot be imaged by us. They grant philosophical warrant we might say, to the affirmation of the Hebrew Bible that God is not to be depicted: “You shall make no graven images.” However they also provide arguments, again, wherein John influences Aquinas, to support the teaching of the Second Council of Nicaea, from 787, which defended the use of icons and sacred images within Christian worship.[32]

The arguments they employ have to do with the humanity of God. In his divine nature, God remains transcendent and hidden, but God has become human precisely so as to depict to us in our own human nature, the personal identity of God. The Word who became flesh reveals the Father, and the Holy Spirit, through his teaching and his filial life among us. Our depictions of him, then, must be regulated by reference to the apostolic teachings pertaining to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. They are not merely of our own human invention, but seek to indicate what God himself has initiated and depicted for us, his own human life, as revelatory of his divine identity. The human life of God, then, is the subject of liturgical commemoration and artistic representation. The iconography of the liturgy is a place where we encounter anew, in the sung and spoken words of the scripture, and in the sacraments, the signs and presence, of Christ himself.

Here we find an idea of cosmic liturgy that recapitulates those two ideas just signaled previously. The person is what is greatest in all of nature. Human persons then are a natural summit of the physical cosmos, which houses its own real and integral agency in imitation of God. Within the temple of this universe persons can gather to encounter the source of all creation, the God who is hidden but present among us, and who has revealed himself to us in his human nature. There is no rivalry between the artistic and theological initiatives of the Church in her sacred liturgy, and the activity and presence of God. Rather, the Church believes that God continually renews a sense of his transcendent presence among us precisely within the liturgy, which depicts God’s humanity to us anew, in words, sacraments, and liturgical experience of God.

The iconic depictions of Christ and the sacramental gestures that symbolize his presence and activity are meant to effectuate what they symbolize. They realize the presence among us, in the Holy Spirit, of the Risen Christ. This too is part of the distinctively Christian understanding of the presence of God in the world and as understood by figures like John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas, it stems organically from the notions of the Incarnation that we have explored.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay was delivered as the Aletheia Lecture on Catholic and Eastern Christianity on 19 September 2024 at Harvard University

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