But you—who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29, my trans.). Jesus’s blunt question to the disciples, it is often said, remains one of the driving questions of Christian faith: the question, for all those who desire to follow him, of how we understand his identity. For the church of the first several centuries, this question was, to a large degree, raised and focused by the scandal of his human weakness: his suffering and death, of course, but also his human growth and his human needs, as witnessed by the New Testament, as well as the limits his finite human nature imposed on his actions and knowledge. If he is truly the Messiah of Israel and the eschatological giver of God’s Holy Spirit, as early Christians were generally ready to confess, what sense can one make of his human ordinariness and obscurity, his human vulnerability and mortality? And if those limiting qualities are taken to be essential to the narrative of how he has actually become humanity’s Savior and Lord—if his death, as Jesus himself suggests on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:26), is in fact the divinely ordained prelude to his resurrection and entry into messianic glory—how must one conceive of him as the subject of that narrative?
The classical understanding of Christian orthodoxy—formed in the early church over seven or eight centuries of preaching and controversy and expressed in a growing stream of biblical commentary, theological argument, creedal confessions, and conciliar formulas—was and continues to be that Jesus is himself the Son of God: the eternal Word “by whom all things were made” (cf. John 1:3), who in time has become a human among humans, in order to transform and liberate the humanity he has made his own, even to offer humanity a share in the life of God. Classical Christian orthodoxy confesses that the Jesus who revealed God’s will and God’s love in works and words of power is “one and the same” as the Jesus who slept in the boat, who wept for Lazarus, and who suffered on the cross: God the Son, humanly “personalizing” the transcendent fullness of the divine Mystery in the body and mind, the relationships and limitations, of his own fully human life. The Second Council of Constantinople (553) expresses this central, irreducible paradox of Christian orthodoxy in the clear, if confrontational, terms of a canonical ultimatum:
If anyone says that the Word of God who performed miracles was someone other than the Christ who suffered, or says that God the Word was with the Christ “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4) or was in him as one in another, but does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh and made human, is one and the same, and that both the miracles and the sufferings which he voluntarily endured in the flesh belong to the same one, let that person be anathema.1
What I suggest in this essay is that this classical understanding of the single, paradoxical identity of Jesus developed precisely as part of an ongoing struggle on the part of the early church to grasp and express the saving meaning of his real human limitations and human sufferings, assuming that they are proper to a subject who is not simply and exclusively a human being. Taking these limitations seriously—limitations that include his human passivities, his ability to experience grief and to suffer and die—was always a challenge for early believers, because such passivities seemed to conflict both with his role as God’s herald and Savior and with the paradigmatic character of his human behavior. Yet the alternative was to disregard the contents of the gospel narrative and to depreciate his humanity in a serious way.
Through the process of protracted, often sharply polemical reflection on the implications of this paradox, early Christian theologians developed a grammar for language about Jesus that staked out the conditions for identifying him in the fullness of apostolic faith—for saying, as far as human and Christian speech can say, just who and what Jesus is, how the reality of God is involved through him in the history of the world, and what God has done for us in him. Only in knowing his identity, patristic Christology suggests—only in being able to name Jesus for who and what he is—do we begin to understand our own human identity and our ultimate vocation.
Clearly it is impossible here to offer a full summary of the growing sense of both the complexity and the simplicity of the identity of Jesus in the writings of those fathers considered to represent the mainstream of early Christian orthodoxy. Here I offer four “snapshots,” four brief and impressionistic characterizations, of the ways four Greek theologians from the second to the seventh century—Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor—invite us to conceive of the identity of Jesus. My hope is that this will both provide us with a sense of developing consistency within the early classical tradition of Christology, building on the New Testament witness yet moving well beyond it philosophically and theologically, and that it will provoke us to deeper reflection for ourselves.
Irenaeus of Lyons
Writing from the frontier region of Gaul around the year 185, Irenaeus tried, in his massive work Against Heresies (Adversus haereses), to confront the recurrent “gnostic” tendency in religious thought, which had already made its presence felt in the small circle of Christian believers, and which continues in various ways to have its appeal: the tendency to deconstruct the continuity and credibility of the public world and of the institutions and religious traditions in which we live; to look on matter and the body, as well the responsibilities we bear toward the material and bodily world, as part of an illusory realm, the creation of a lesser god, the fruit of a superhuman conspiracy, or a cosmic mistake; and to see human freedom, the redemption of the human spirit from illusion and enslavement to history, as possible only through a radically revisionist narrative of our origins, which calls us to disregard the accepted realities of daily life and find our meaning within ourselves, in the secret “enlightenment” communicated to an elect few. For Christian gnostics of the second century, such as the Valentinians, the source of this redeeming knowledge was thought to be the Savior Jesus: not the earthy Jewish prophet of the four Gospels, but the representative of an archetypal plērōma of heavenly actors, whose doings long antedate the history of the material world, and who engage in this present history only to rescue from it those few who can see the illusion of matter, flesh, and human institutions for what it is.2
Irenaeus’s concern, through all the twists and turns of his proclaimed “unmasking and refutation” of gnostic teaching, is to argue for the unity and religious relevance of what ordinary Christians regard as the real world—the unity of God as Creator and Savior and the unity of the biblical narrative, the created universe, the human person, and the worldwide church and its message—and to insist that it is in this world, in this history, in this body, for all their limitations, that the gospel of redemption through Christ is already on the way to fulfillment. Only in such a unified framework of time and space is there an intelligible form to the story of human alienation and hope, a convincing proclamation of good news. And in this unified narrative, the identity of Jesus as both divine Word and fleshly human being is clearly the paradoxical heart of the story of salvation, the link between source and goal, promise and fulfillment.
So in book 3 of Against Heresies, Irenaeus criticizes the gnostics for being unaware “that [God’s] only-begotten Word—who is always present with the human race, united to and mingled with the work of his hands,3 according to the Father’s pleasure, and who became flesh—is himself Jesus Christ our Lord, who did also suffer for us and rose again on our behalf.”4
By experiencing in himself every stage and aspect of human growth, while communicating to his own body and to the human family in solidarity with him God’s own incorruptible life, Irenaeus’s Word-made-flesh becomes the unique Mediator, the only one capable of restoring friendship and communio between humanity and its Creator.
In explaining Jesus’s work of mediation in book 4 of Against Heresies, Irenaeus lays special emphasis on the revelation of God’s glory—of God’s life-restoring presence to the human mind and senses—which only Jesus, as Word and Son in human form, can achieve. For Irenaeus, it is the revelation of God in the historical, fleshly Jesus that is the heart of redemption.
For the manifestation of the Son is the knowledge of the Father; for all things are manifested through the Word. . . . For the Lord taught us that no one is capable of knowing God, unless he be taught of God—that is, that God cannot be known without God—but that this is the express will of the Father, that God should be known. . . . For by means of the creation itself, the Word reveals God the Creator; and by means of the world, [reveals] the Lord as maker of the world; and by means of the formation [of the human creature, reveals] the craftsman who formed him; and by the Son [reveals] that Father who begot the Son. . . . And through the Word himself who had been made visible and palpable, the Father was shown forth; and although all did not equally believe in him, still all did see the Father in the Son: for the Father is the invisible of the Son, but the Son is the visible of the Father. And for that reason everyone called him “the Christ” while he was present [on earth], and named him “God.”5
By revealing his splendor in the incarnate Word, God communicates life to mortal creatures, draws them into the vital communio of his own radiance.
In identifying the saving work of Christ with his presence on earth as incarnate Word, God made real flesh, Irenaeus even looks beyond Christ’s revelatory role to connect his person with the continuing sacramental life of the church. So in book 5 of Against Heresies, he emphasizes the importance of the Eucharist, taken in this life to be our bodily nourishment, as a pledge of the fullness of the redemption that will be achieved for us in the resurrection of our own material, mortal bodies. It is only because the Word of God has actually become flesh and blood himself, he insists, that the Eucharist, the food that conveys his flesh and blood to us in liturgical signs, can be for us a promise of everlasting life.
If [our flesh] does not attain to salvation, then neither did the Lord redeem us with his blood, nor is the cup of the Eucharist the communion of his blood, nor the bread which we break the communion of his body. For blood can only come from veins and flesh, and whatever else makes up the substance of a human person. When the Word of God actually was made this, he redeemed us by his own blood. . . . When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receive the Word of God, the Eucharist becomes the body of Christ, and from these things the substance of our flesh grows and is supported. How, then, can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal?6
Here as before, Irenaeus emphasizes the complex identity of Jesus, God’s eternal Word who has made our limited, visible, material nature his own, as itself the key to the church’s present faith in him as Savior, and to the church’s hope that our flesh will share in the salvation he offers. For gnostic Christians, the passible and limited body and the whole visible bodily order of fragile human relationships and limiting human institutions constitute the world from which Christ came to save us by secret knowledge. Irenaeus, by contrast, and with him the growing consensus of Christian tradition, proclaims the body, the church, and the world as forming together the locus of salvation, precisely because in the person of Jesus the life-giving Word has made all of these things his own.
Athanasius of Alexandria
It is no exaggeration to say that Athanasius’s whole long career as bishop and theologian was occupied with the church’s fourth-century struggle to identify who and what Jesus is. Born in the closing years of the third century, Athanasius was elected bishop of Alexandria in 328, three years after the presbyter Arius had been excommunicated by the Council of Nicaea, essentially for his insistence that the Son of God is himself the first and noblest of creatures. But the issues raised by Arius and his followers were not resolved by Nicaea’s creed and canons. From the early 340s until his death in 373, Athanasius continued to fight for a strong conception of Jesus’s identity as fully divine, giving an increasingly explicit emphasis on the importance of the Nicene Creed’s formulation that the Son is “of the same substance as the Father.”
Undoubtedly, both Arian and Nicene approaches to Jesus’s identity were the agenda of theological families, rather than organically developed theological systems; undoubtedly too, as Nicaea’s “substance” language was accepted, understood, and eventually extended to include the Holy Spirit’s relationship to the Father, this understanding grew slowly throughout the fourth century and found varied expressions among different authors.7 Still, the thinking that Athanasius opposed throughout his career had a relatively consistent pattern: the well-established tradition of Platonic and earlier Christian thought that saw God’s activity in the world as communicated in steps, and that conceived of the Son and the Holy Spirit, God’s mediating agents in creation, as themselves produced, even “created” by a wholly transcendent Father, as God’s first steps in self-communication. As such, Son and Spirit were understood to participate in the Father’s being and operations to such a preeminent extent that they might legitimately be called “divine,” even “like the Father in all things”; but they were seen as less than the Father in their being, simply because the Father alone is the primordial source of all that is.
Part of the Arian argument, it seems, came from scriptural references to the limitations of knowledge professed by Jesus, the Word made flesh, in passages such as Matthew 24:36, as well as from the New Testament witness to Jesus’s ability to grow and change (e.g., Luke 2:52)—both seen as features not of divine substance but of the world of “becoming.”8 Similarly, the suffering of Christ was seen as a crucial part of the vulnerability and limitation that prove the creaturely status of the Son.9
Against this Arian view, Athanasius argued with increasing energy throughout his life for a view of the Word—and in his later works, also of the Spirit—as fully equal with the Father in being and life, fully one reality with the Father, precisely because both Word and Spirit accomplish within creation what only God, and not a creature, can do. For Athanasius, God’s transcendent Logos, or active Reason, eternally generated by the Father within the divine Mystery itself, is commissioned to be the Father’s active and ordering presence in the world. God, as God, is totally “other” than creation; nothing that belongs to the created realm (which for Athanasius means what is brought into being from nothing) can be called “divine” in the strict sense. So God the Word and God the Spirit, whom baptismal faith instinctively recognizes as divine because they impart to creatures a share in divine life, must be seen as other than creation, but not distant from it: not part of creation, yet so actively involved in it, so present to it for its good, that they can direct, order, and heal it from within. This presence to creation of the Word, who is not a creature, is realized most fully, Athanasius argues, in his incarnation.10
In Athanasius’s decades-long campaign to refute the Arian position in all its many shades and to promote a strong sense of the Son’s full status as God, even after he has made a human form or “body” his own,11 the scandal of Jesus’s limitations and sufferings, as well as their crucial importance to his identity as Savior, plays a critical, if complex, role. This is made clear in what are considered his earliest works: the pair of apologetic treatises written probably in the early 330s, known as Against the Pagans (Contra gentes) and The Incarnation (De incarnatione).12 Like a fourth-century anticipation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?, these essays offer an elaborate argument for the plausibility of the Christian conception of an incarnate, saving, crucified Logos by telling the story of how humanity, originally created to participate in the ordered rationality of the divine Logos, and so to share in the divine quality of incorruptibility by knowing God, lost that gift by fatal choices. Humanity therefore needed to be redeemed, reshaped in God’s image, endowed again with unending life, by the Word’s coming to share in our world, our wounded physicality, and even our death.
In the early chapters of The Incarnation, Athanasius poignantly describes the effects of human sin on the descendants of Adam and Eve, depicting sin as a growing epidemic that has robbed humanity of its rationality and vitality and reduced it to being dominated by greed and violence, like other animal species. Then Athanasius points out the only remedy left to the Logos, as just and compassionate Creator: to take on human corruptibility and mortality himself, and to overcome death in his own person, through his identity as incarnate Word. “To this end,” he writes, the Word “took to himself a body capable of death, that it, by partaking of the Word who is above all, might be worthy to die in the place of all, and might, because of the Word which had come to dwell in it, remain incorruptible, and that from then on corruption might be kept from all by the grace of the resurrection.”13
In this treatise, Athanasius identifies the saving effect of the Word’s incarnation in two principal ways: as his restoration of vital energy within the vulnerable human community “in putting away death from us and renewing us again”;14 but equally as the revelation to fallen human minds of the Word’s power and presence, restoring to them the similarity to himself that makes them rational and holy, by manifesting again in the human world the Word’s own holiness and rationality.15 Like Irenaeus,16 Athanasius is convinced that the Word’s self-revelation in human terms itself opens up the new possibility of human participation in God’s immortality.17 Even Jesus’s death on the cross—for ancient minds, the principal obstacle to belief in his divine identity—Athanasius describes as a moment of revelation: only a real death, a death inflicted by the violence of others, a death in public view, could qualify as the prelude to definitive resurrection and victory. “He accepted on the cross, and endured, a death inflicted by others, and above all by his enemies, which they thought dreadful and ignominious and not to be faced; so that when this also was destroyed, both he himself might be believed to be the life, and the power of death might be brought utterly to nought.”18 Jesus’s passion reveals most forcefully, for Athanasius, the cost to God of his decision to restore humanity by taking our weakness to himself, but also its effect on faith.
Athanasius returns to the troubling issue of the weakness and mortality of the incarnate Word in his Third Oration against the Arians, written probably in Rome toward the end of his second exile, in 345–46. In this somewhat rambling treatise, he deals in detail with the scriptural arguments of Nicaea’s opponents against the notion that the Word, generated by the Father and capable of incarnation, even of suffering, could be “of the same substance” as the Father. Athanasius’s refutation of Arian exegesis follows a single form: the one Mystery proclaimed in the Gospels is that indeed “the Word has become flesh,” the divine Son has taken on a body such as ours, to communicate through that human body a new revelation of God and new vitality; therefore the passages in Scripture that ascribe to the Son weakness or ignorance, or even a creaturely dependence on God, are to be taken as referring to his acquired humanity, his “flesh,” and not to his core identity as God the Word. If Arians point to his human weaknesses as “ground for low thoughts concerning the Son of God,” they must also “from his divine works recognize the Word who is in the Father, and hence renounce their self-willed irreligion”!19 The gospel narrative presents us with a Jesus whose identity is complex, paradoxical; yet for Athanasius that identity is itself both the key to right interpretation of Scripture and its central message of salvation.
Athanasius goes on to apply this principle to Jesus’s physical and mental suffering, in Gethsemane and on the cross:
Wherefore of necessity when he was in a passible body, weeping and toiling, these things which are proper to the flesh are ascribed to him, together with the body. . . . And as to his saying, “If it be possible, let the cup pass” [Matt. 26:39], observe how, though he thus spoke, he rebuked Peter, saying, “You are not thinking the things that are of God, but those that are human” [Matt. 16:23]. For he willed what he deprecated—and that was why he had come; but his was the willing (for this was why he came!), but the terror belonged to the flesh. Therefore as a human being he utters this speech also; and yet again, both were said by the same one, to show that he was God, willing this himself, but that having become human, he had a flesh that was in terror. For the sake of this flesh he combined his own will with human weakness, that by destroying this he might, in turn, make humans undaunted in face of death.20
Athanasius is not yet ready—as Augustine and later Maximus the Confessor would be—to acknowledge explicitly in the incarnate Word two naturally distinct wills, two fully operative (if utterly incommensurate) levels of psychological and cognitive activity. For him, the decisive, conscious agent in the life and works of Christ, even in his moments of most abject suffering, is the Word who is divine. Fear, pain, ignorance, mortality are all proper to “flesh”—our flesh, humanity in its fallen state, deprived of the clarity of vision and incorruptibility of life that God had intended for us when he originally shaped us in the image of the Son. Yet Athanasius repeatedly argues that the Word, by making these weaknesses of “the flesh” his own, has begun to transform and heal them. So he sees in Gethsemane and Calvary the testing place of the saving identity of Jesus: there Jesus experiences as his own a true human terror, a sense of abandonment in the face of death, yet he remains willing to carry out the eternal plan of sacrificial love, which is both his own and his Father’s.21
Cyril of Alexandria
Athanasius’s learned and strong-minded successor in the first half of the fifth century, Cyril of Alexandria, exerted perhaps the most formative influence on what have become the classic Christian language-rules for speaking of the complex identity of Jesus the Savior. Taking “body” and “flesh” in the fullest sense of their biblical usage, to signify not only biological materiality but also mind, feelings, and will, Cyril speaks of the human Jesus not as an “assumed man,” as some of his Antiochene contemporaries would do, but as “one Christ along with his flesh, the same at once God and a human being.”22 Cyril’s emphasis on the radical unity of Christ as subject of all that is predicated of him, and on the divine Word as the basis and central focus of that unity, is rich with implications for his portrait of Jesus. In his celebrated Third Letter to Nestorius (of Constantinople), written in the autumn of 430—a manifesto on the orthodox understanding of the Savior as the basis for continuing communion in faith and sacrament between the two prelates and their churches—Cyril insists that this sense of Jesus’s unity as subject is the warrant for our worship of him, “without separating and parting the human and God as though they were mutually connected [only] by unity of rank and sovereignty.”23 An awareness of this unity enables the participant in a eucharistic liturgy to recognize in the sacramental gifts “not mere flesh (God forbid!) or the flesh of a man hallowed by connection with the Word, but the truly life-giving flesh belonging properly to God the Word himself.”24 It presents Christ’s priestly sacrifice on the cross, identified as such typologically in the Letter to the Hebrews, as the Son’s offering of his own body to the Father, “for us and not for himself.”25 And it provides the real justification for Cyril’s insistence, throughout his quarrel with Nestorius, on the importance to orthodoxy of Mary’s traditional title, “God-Bearer” (Theotokos), since the church believes that the eternal Word of God “united what is human to himself in his own concrete individuality [kath’ hypostasin] and underwent fleshly birth from her womb.”26
The dispute between Cyril and the representatives of the Antiochene exegetical and theological tradition—Nestorius, Theodoret of Cyrus, and their teachers Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia—was not primarily a dispute about the fullness of Christ’s humanity, as has sometimes been suggested in the past: a dispute in which the Antiochenes were primarily concerned with emphasizing that humanity, while the Alexandrians only offered it lip service.27 Rather, the main differences seem to lie in different senses of the relevance of history and time to salvation, and of the ontological and existential boundaries between God and the world. For Antiochenes such as Theodore or Theodoret, the saving and transforming encounter of humanity with God, with all the freedom from corruptibility, passion, and sin that it promises, is a gift reserved in its fullness for the eschatological future, a new “state” (katastasis) that at present is realized only by the risen Christ, yet pointed to by Scripture and the symbols of the church’s worship. The world in which we presently live is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from God and his eternity, in the Antiochene view, and the main task of theology is to keep its language about God pure from anything that might confuse these realms, or imply some limitation or circumscription of God’s being.28 For Cyril and his followers, on the other hand, the news of the incarnation of the Word is precisely that the God who is ontologically “other” than creation has now become personally present within it, has made a human creature his own embodiment, united it to his own concrete existence or hypostasis, identified himself with the full individual nature of a man, so that the creative and healing energies proper to God are now accessible in time, in the person of Christ and in the church that is his body. Although in his polemical treatises against Cyril, Theodoret as a result lays strong emphasis on the importance of keeping the Word free from any suggestion of sharing in human suffering, Cyril insists with equal force that the Christian message of salvation rests on the paradoxical but literal ascription of human suffering—acquired through incarnation—to God the Word. So he writes, again in his Third Letter to Nestorius of 430: “We confess that the very Son begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten God, impassible though he is in his own nature, has, as the Bible says, suffered in flesh for our sake [1 Pet. 4:1], and that he was in the crucified body making the sufferings of his flesh his own, in an impassible way.”29
Cyril’s reason for insisting on this living paradox of a divine Word who suffers, not as God, but still truly suffers in his own flesh, as Warren Smith has pointed out,30 is not simply to head off the Antiochene criticism that his portrait of Christ compromises the divine attribute of impassibility. Rather, it is central to his soteriology that the Word made flesh should indeed suffer what we humans suffer, but that he suffer it in a way free from the elements of compulsion, self-preoccupation, and fear that normally accompany our own experience of pain and weakness.31 Christ is fully human, yet human in a freer and more virtuous way than we can be—in a way that offers us both a model and an unattainable norm—because he is himself God the Son. As Cyril remarks in his Scholia on the Incarnation, “He has reserved to his [human] nature that it should be superior to all.”32
In an interesting fragment of book 7 of his Commentary on John (written before the controversy with Nestorius began), Cyril makes this same point with reference to human grief, with which Jesus is said to have struggled at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:33–34). The Fourth Gospel tells us that Jesus “was indignant and was troubled” (my trans.) as he stood before Lazarus’s tomb. Cyril writes:
Since Christ was not only God by nature, but also a human being, he suffers in a human way along with everyone else. But when grief begins to be stirred up in him, and the holy flesh is inclined to shed tears, he does not allow it to suffer this in an unrestrained way, as usually happens with us. “He was indignant33 in the Spirit” [John 11:33]: that is, in the power of the Holy Spirit he rebukes his own flesh, so to speak. . . . For this is the reason the Word of God, powerful in every way, came to be in flesh—or rather, came to be flesh: that by the activities of his own Spirit he might strengthen the weaknesses of the flesh, and set this nature free from an earthbound way of thinking, and might reshape it to be concerned only with what pleases God. For surely it is an illness of human nature to be tyrannized by grief; but this, too, has been abolished first in Christ, along with our other illnesses, that [its abolition] might come over from him to us.34
In the complex subjective identity of the Word made flesh, the inner dialogue between these two complete and wholly different realms of being leads to a new subordination of what is human to God, and to new human freedom from the tyranny of our passions—a freedom now accessible to us all through Jesus’s own person.
Maximus the Confessor
The immediate solution to the bitter fifth-century dispute between Cyril of Alexandria and the Antiochene theologians over how to conceive and express the identity of Jesus—although by no means a final, comprehensive solution—was the formulation of Christian faith in his person hammered out by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and appended to the normative creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople I as a kind of hermeneutical key. Rejecting any formulation that might suggest a permanent separation or an indiscriminate confusion of the human and the divine in Jesus, insisting on the full reality of both levels of his existence as a single person, the language agreed on at Chalcedon confesses him to be
one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same one perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, truly God and truly human, . . . recognized in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, with the difference between the natures in no way removed through the union; rather, the distinctive property of both natures is preserved and comes together in a single persona and a single concrete individual [hypostasis].35
The language of the Chalcedonian formula was carefully woven together from a variety of earlier conciliar and theological texts, representing both sides of the debate as well as earlier stages of agreement between them.36 Yet the formula offered a divided Eastern Christendom little respite from the bitter disputes of the 430s and 440s. For theologians sympathetic to the Antiochene tradition, for ecclesiastical politicians looking for consensus, and for most Western theologians, it seemed a welcome and evenhanded compromise; but for the great majority of monks, clergy, and faithful outside of the main cities of the Eastern Empire, as well as for a number of Eastern Christian intellectuals of the late fifth century, it was an equivocation, a failure to acknowledge the centrally divine identity of the Savior as the core of even his human experiences and acts. For those who rejected the Chalcedonian formula, in the fifth century and afterward, only the terminology of Cyril’s later letters, centered on the formula “one nature of the Word, made flesh,” captured the vital, mutually expressive unity of the human and the divine elements that determined the identity of Jesus.37
In the second quarter of the seventh century, the Emperor Heraclius’s efforts to reunify the Eastern Empire led to new efforts on the part of his court bishops to find a way of construing the official Chalcedonian Christology that might be acceptable to dissident Christians. Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople (in office 610–38), borrowing a phrase from Pseudo-Dionysius’s Letter 4, cautiously advanced the theory that all the human activities of Christ, mental and bodily, were manifestations of “a single theandric operation [mia theandrikē energeia],” flowing forth from God’s power and using his human nature as a created instrument. Sergius seems quickly to have refined this position in a somewhat more psychological direction, arguing in letters from the late 620s onward that the human experiences and actions of Jesus all express the single will and operation of the Second Person of the Trinity, even though they do so through the instrumentality of the complete human nature that God the Son has made his own. It was in response to this attempt to reread Chalcedon yet again that Maximus the Confessor was to make his name and then bear final witness with his life.
Maximus was a well-educated native of Constantinople, born about 580, who had spent some years as a bureaucrat at the imperial court. He became a monk about 613 and eventually moved west with other Byzantines to escape the Persian invasion of western Asia Minor, settling in Carthage around 628–29, where he kept up a lively theological correspondence throughout the Greek-speaking world. For Maximus, Sergius’s new interpretation of the Chalcedonian formula amounted to a tacit denial of its central affirmation about the identity of Jesus: the completeness of his two utterly incommensurate, fully functioning realities—that of God and that of a human—yoked together in the unique historical particularity of a single individual. Every nature, Maximus argued, to be completely itself, must be completely operational—a nature, after all, in classical Aristotelian terminology, is a substance (a definable kind of being, a “what”) considered as a principle of operation. And since willing and desiring are integral to all intellectual natures, forming part of what we mean by consciousness, to deny that Jesus possesses a full human will (thelēma physikon), which by natural impulse seeks its own human welfare, is to deny the fullness of his human nature, affirmed by the tradition of faith and canonized at Chalcedon. So Maximus writes to Marinus, a Cypriot deacon, in 642:
Every being that is rational by nature is clearly also by nature able to will. And if [Jesus] had, as a human being, a natural will, surely he willed those things, in accordance with his substance, that he himself, as God the Creator, had placed within that nature for its own continued existence. He did not come to do violence to the nature that he, as God and Word, had made. He came, rather, to divinize completely that nature, which he willed to have as his own.38
For Maximus, as for Athanasius three centuries earlier, the test case of Jesus’s identity in the Gospels, in terms of consciousness and will, is the scene of his agony in Gethsemane. But while Athanasius construed that story in terms of a tension between the Word and his “flesh,” Maximus sees at play simply an instance of what is implied more broadly by the Christology of Chalcedon: Jesus’s two natures, with all their faculties and operations, remain intact and distinct, but his single hypostasis—his unique individual way (tropos) of being God and being human—gives a different modality to both his eternal existence as Son of God and his historical existence as son of Mary. Jesus is, as Maximus remarks in several places, “divine in a human way and human in a divine way.”39 For the human will and the other human faculties of Jesus, this divine modality, communicated by the divine hypostasis whose nature it is, brings that human nature to its own creaturely perfection. So he writes of the Gethsemane scene, in Opusculum 7, that in Jesus’s prayer for deliverance there was a clear expression of his humanity’s natural dynamism toward self-preservation:
On the other hand, that it [Jesus’s human will] was completely deified and in agreement with the divine will, that it was always moved and formed by it and remained in accord with it, is clear from the fact that he always carried out perfectly the decision of his Father’s will, and that alone. So, as a human being, he said, “Not my will, but your will be done” [Luke 22:42]. In this he offered himself to us as a model and norm for putting away our own wills to fulfill God’s will perfectly, even if we should see death threatening us as a result. . . . He had, then, a human will. . . . Constantly and completely divinized by its assent to, and its union with, the Father’s will, it was, to put it precisely, divine by union, not divine by nature; so it truly became, and so it should be called. But it never departed from its natural constitution by being divinized.40
In a number of his writings, Maximus stresses that it is precisely the unique structure of Jesus’s person that contains and reveals the promised eschatological structure of human salvation.41 In the identity of Jesus, Maximus discovers the full reality of grace, laid open to us in the divine modality of Jesus’s humanity, and sees there at the same time the full realization of human nature as it was created to be. “Divinization,” a hallowed term in the Greek patristic tradition for the goal of God’s gracious work in redeemed humanity, is thus for him both a gift beyond the resources of human nature and the full realization of what God intends human nature to become. It has first been achieved, Maximus argues, in the person of Christ.
Concluding Reflections
In the four Greek fathers whose treatment of Christ we have briefly surveyed here, it is his human weakness—his ability to suffer and die and the limitation of his energy, strength, and intellect—which raise the greatest challenge to the church’s proclamation of his lordship and stimulate the most profound theological reflection on what it might mean to say, with the centurion at Calvary, “This person truly was Son of God” (Mark 15:39, my trans.). Irenaeus’s opposition to gnostic portraits of Christ clearly rests on an affirmation of the central importance of Jesus’s inner-worldly materiality—a realm that for gnostic thought was irreducibly alien to God—for the full message of salvation. Athanasius, two centuries later, sees in the suffering of Jesus the full proof that God’s Word has taken on the complex, damaged human reality that Athanasius calls “flesh” and has begun to transform it by making it the vehicle of revelation and renewed life. Cyril of Alexandria, along with his fifth-century contemporaries, develops a more nuanced technical vocabulary for speaking of the identity of Jesus—of what is single and what is twofold in his identity, and how they are related—and argues that in the very act of making our human weakness his own, the Son of God has begun to transform us, to give us virtue and life in place of sin and death, simply by being both God and fully human at once. Maximus the Confessor, in the seventh century, continues to reflect on the structure of Christ’s person, using the vocabulary of Cyril and the Council of Chalcedon; for Maximus, Christ’s will is especially the place in which human freedom begins to share in the transcendent freedom of God, and to choose, by the grace that Christ communicates, the destiny for which God created humanity in the beginning.
All of these portraits of the person of Christ are way stations in a continuing process of Christian reflection on who Jesus really is and what he means for us: reflections on the identity and work of Jesus that are rooted in the narrative of the Gospels and the apostolic witness, and that constantly return to the New Testament for judgment and verification. These patristic readings of the Gospels are framed, certainly, by certain particular New Testament affirmations about Jesus that set the hermeneutical conditions for reading the longer narratives of his life and work: by the schema of the self-emptying and glorification of one who in the beginning is “equal with God,” formulated in Philippians 2:5–11; by the portrait of Jesus, Son of God and high priest, who “learned obedience through what he suffered,” presented in Hebrews 4:14–5:10; and perhaps above all by the affirmation, in the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel, that the Word who “was in the beginning with God . . . became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:2, 12). Yet patristic reflection on the person of Christ clearly expresses a tradition of faith and understanding that moves into realms of discourse and conceptuality that the New Testament writers could never have imagined or understood, a tradition that continues to evolve wherever Christians receive and think about the gospel. As Athanasius argues in defense of the creedal language of Nicaea, the fact that both the supporters and the opponents of Arius could use similar scriptural texts and phrases to undergird their opposed positions made it necessary for the council to employ “strange” terms—terms taken from philosophy and science rather than Scripture—as interpretative norms for ensuring that the Scriptures themselves would be understood in the way the Christian tradition had always taken them, and as the New Testament’s apostolic authors had intended them.42
If we ourselves are to make sense of the classical Christian understanding of Jesus’s identity that emerges in these and other early Christian writers, we must keep several cautions in mind. The two distinct “substances” or “natures” that early theology sees in the person of Christ are, of course, two wholly incommensurable realities—not two parallel species of being competing for central stage. The one does not rule out the other. And the one “person” the church recognizes as “owning” these two substances or natures is not classically understood in the way modern Westerners conceive of a person, defined by being a unique and self-contained pole of consciousness and free decisions, capable of forming relationships with other, equally distinct persons. In the classical understanding of both the triune God and of Jesus Christ, “persons” or hypostases are irreducible individual subjects of predication and attribution; yet the heart of both these Mysteries, for Christian faith, is that the three related “persons” in God share a single consciousness and will, a single substance, and that the one “person” of the incarnate Word possesses both an infinite divine mind and will, and a complete human mind and will like our own. For the post-Chalcedonian understanding of the person of Christ, the Mystery of the gospel is that God the Son—“one of the Holy Trinity”—is “selved” in the full human knowledge and freedom of the Son of Mary and expresses in Jesus’s human life and actions what it is to be Son of the Father and giver of the Spirit. The one who is “God from God, light from light,” in Nicene language, has lived out in a human life, in a human body and mind, with all their inherent vulnerability and promise, what eternal Sonship means, so that we too, who call Jesus “Lord,” might also dare to call God “Father” and to live in his Spirit as God’s sons and daughters.
In a famous passage in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), the Second Vatican Council makes this same link between the identity of Jesus and the identity to which all of us are called, in grace: “In reality it is only in the Mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first human, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the Mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals humanity to itself, and brings to light its very high calling.”43
In the Greek Fathers we have surveyed here, that same Christian intuition is expressed with increasing clarity and wonder. In the person of Jesus—a human who, at the moment of his most abject human weakness and suffering, is recognized as “truly Son of God”—the ancient faith of Christians finds both the pledge of God’s indomitable love and the form of our human vocation. The identity of Jesus, however we parse it, is meant to be the pattern and promise of our own identity.
1. Second Council of Constantinople, canon 3, trans. Josef Neuner and Jacques Dupuis, The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church (New York: Alba House, 1982), 159, alt., emphasis added.
2. See, e.g., The Treatise on Resurrection (To Rheginus) (Nag Hammadi I,3) 46.22–34; 47.31–48.20; The Apocryphon of John (Nag Hammadi II,1) 23.21–36; The Dialogue of the Savior (Nag Hammadi III,5) 140.10–142.16; The Concept of Our Great Power (Nag Hammadi VI,4) 46.7–47.9.
3. The Greek word here is plasma, meaning that which is shaped by God’s hands, thus expressing “creation” in its most palpable sense.
4. Irenaeus, Against Heresies (= Haer.) 3.16.6, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in ANF 1:442, alt.
5. Irenaeus, Haer. 4.6.3–6, in ANF 1:468–69, alt.
6. Irenaeus, Haer. 5.2.2–3, in ANF 1:528, alt., following a Greek fragment.
7. There is abundant literature in English on the fourth-century controversies surrounding Arius and Nicaea. See, e.g., John Behr, The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004); and Lewis Ayres, The Faith of Nicaea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
8. This complex of ideas held by Arius and his associates is most clearly attested in the encyclical letter of Alexander of Alexandria and his clergy, contained in Socrates’s Ecclesiastical History 1.6.4–6 (see Hans-Georg Opitz, ed., Athanasius Werke [AW] III/1:8.2–10 [= Urk. 4b.8–10]; trans. J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius [London: SPCK, 1987], 343). (Urk. identifies the document number in Opitz’s Early Arian Documents [German: Urkunden]: http://www.fourthcentury.com/urkunde-chart-opitz/.) The most penetrating analysis of Arius’s theological position and its philosophical and cultural roots remains Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
9. Opitz, AW III/1:25.15–22 [= Urk. 14.37].
10. For helpful synthetic presentations of Athanasius’s theology, see Alvyn Petterson, Athanasius (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995); Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998).
11. Athanasius has been criticized by some twentieth-century scholars for thinking of the incarnate Word simply as “the Word and his body,” without taking seriously his human soul or interior life. See R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 448, who goes so far as to call this a “space-suit Christology,” in which Jesus is seen as simply “putting on” human flesh as an instrument for action in an alien environment. For a critical response to this view, see Alvyn Petterson, Athanasius and the Human Body (Bristol: Bristol Press, 1990); Khaled Anatolios, “‘The Body as Instrument’: A Reevaluation of Athanasius’ Logos-Sarx Christology,” Coptic Church Review 18 (1997): 78–84.
12. For a discussion of the dating of these treatises, and an argument for what is now the most widely accepted date—around 330—see Anatolios, Athanasius, 26–27.
13. Athanasius, The Incarnation (= Inc.) 9, trans. Archibald Robertson, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. E. R Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 40–41, alt.; this translation is hereafter cited as Robertson.
14. Athanasius, Inc. 16, trans. Robertson, 45.
15. Ibid. See also Athanasius’s description of the original grace, the “second gift” bestowed on the human race at its beginning but soon lost by the misuse of the human will: ibid., 3.
16. For this connection, see Khaled Anatolios, “The Influence of Irenaeus on Athanasius,” StPatr 36 (2001): 463–76.
17. See, e.g., Athanasius, Inc. 54, trans. Robertson, 65.
18. Athanasius, Inc. 24, trans. Robertson, 49, alt.
19. Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 3:55, trans. John Henry Newman, NPNF2 4:423.
20. Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 3:56–57, trans. Newman, NPNF2 4:424, alt.
21. This is emphasized not only in the present passage but throughout The Incarnation: see esp. 27–32, 46–55.
22. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 12, anathema 2, trans. and ed. Lionel R. Wickham, Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 28–29.
23. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 4, trans. Wickham, 19.
24. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 7, trans. Wickham, 23, alt.
25. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 9, trans. Wickham, 25.
26. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 11, trans. Wickham, 29, alt.
27. See the critique of this widespread conception by John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy; Its History, Theology, and Texts (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 205.
28. For a discussion of the eschatological orientation of Antiochene thought, see esp. Günter Koch, Die Heilsverwirklichung bei Theodor von Mopsuestia, Münchener theologische Studien 31 (Munich: Max Hueber, 1965); Günter Koch, Strukturen und Geschichte des Heils in der Theologie des Theodoret von Kyros, Frankfurter theologische Studien 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Knecht, 1974); Joanne McWilliam Dewart, The Theology of Grace of Theodore of Mopsuestia (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1971).
29. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 6, trans. Wickham, 21, alt. For recent discussion of Cyril’s position on the “impassible suffering” of God the Word in the controversy with Nestorius and Theodoret, see John J. O’Keefe, “Impassible Suffering? Divine Passion and Fifth-Century Christology,” Theological Studies 58 (1997): 39–60; Joseph Hallman, “The Seed of Fire: Divine Suffering in the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997): 369–91; J. Warren Smith, “Suffering Impassibly: Christ’s Passion in Cyril of Alexandria’s Soteriology,” chapter 14 of the present volume.
30. Smith, “Suffering Impassibly.”
31. See Cyril, Second Oration to the Royal Ladies (PG 76:1393B).
32. Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation of the Only Begotten 37; text edited by Philip E. Pusey, Cyrilli archiepiscopi Alexandrini Opera (reprint, Brussels: Culture & Civilisation, 1965), 6:574–75; trans. Philip E. Pusey, St. Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria: Five Tomes against Nestorius [etc.] (Oxford: Parker, 1881), 232–33.
33. The Greek word in John 11:33, embrimaomai, is usually translated as indicating deep emotion: “deeply moved” (RSV), “greatly disturbed” (NRSV), “greatly distressed” (NJB). The original meaning of the verb is “to snort,” and it is used for horses; yet in its (fairly infrequent) application to humans, it appears to mean “to express anger,” “to rebuke indignantly,” as in Dan. 11:30 LXX; Mark 1:43; Matt. 9:30. Whatever case can be made for the various modern English softenings of John 11:33, Cyril clearly understands the verb to mean that Jesus “rebuked” his own flesh, in the power of the Holy Spirit, for its tendency to be undone by grief. It is in response to this inner, divine rebuke that his human nature is then said to be visibly “troubled” but ultimately healed of this weakness.
34. Fragment on John 11:33–34, ed. Philip E. Pusey, Sancti Patris nostri Cyrilli archiepiscopi Alexandrini in D. Joannis Evangelium (Oxford: Clarendon, 1872), 2:279–80. For a discussion of Cyril’s understanding of the person and saving work of Christ in this commentary, see Lars Koen, The Saving Passion: Incarnational and Soteriological Thought in Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on the Gospel according to St. John, Studia doctrinae Christianae Upsaliensia 31 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1991).
35. Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, Nicaea I to Lateran V (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 86.
36. For an analysis of the text, see Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: Mowbray, 1975), 543–54, and the literature cited there.
37. For details of the reactions to Chalcedon, see esp. Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2.1 (Atlanta: John Knox, 1985) and vol. 2.2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994); Patrick Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553) (Leiden: Brill, 1979); William H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
38. Maximus, Opusculum 7 (PG 91:77B–C).
39. See, e.g., Letter 15 (PG 91:573B); Letter 19 (PG 91:593A2–B1); Opusculum 4 (PG 91:61B–C); Opusculum 7 (PG 91:84B–D); Disputation with Pyrrhus (PG 91:297D–298A).
40. Opusculum 7 (PG 91:80D, 81D).
41. See To Thalassius, Question 60 (CCSG 22:73.10–19). Maximus’s collection of responses to Thalassius, mainly dealing with questions of scriptural interpretation, dates from his early years in Carthage, 630–633.
42. See Athanasius, Defense of the Nicene Definition 18–24, esp. 21: “Let anyone who is ready to learn recognize that, even if these expressions are not found this way in the Scriptures, still—as we have said before—they contain the sense derived from Scripture, and by giving it expression they signify it to those whose hearing is completely attuned to piety.” Cf. Origen, First Principles 1, preface 2.
43. Gaudium et Spes 22, trans. Paul Lennon, in Vatican Council II, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello, 1996), 185.